Plantation Dominion
by mouse8
Summary: A simple salt and burn proves to be anything but simple, and Sam and Dean will be tested to the limits of their endurance. Ch 9 up. Story completed.
1. Chapter 1

Title: Planation Dominion

Author: Mouse

Rating: T. I don't usually use profanity in a story, but Dean goes his own way, so there is occasional swearing in this story.

Category: Second season case file.

Summary: A simple salt and burn proves to be anything but simple, and Sam and Dean will be tested to the limits of their endurance.

Author's Note: I wrote most of this a long while ago, but couldn't bring myself to finish as the boys became more estranged. This is for people who loved the show way back in Season 2 when the Winchesters would do anything for each other. Thanks to Susan, as always, for her wonderful beta work, and most of all for encouraging me to finish. It wouldn't have happened without you! This story is complete, and a chapter will be posted every few days as my beta finishes her editing and sends them to me.

To those who have followed me here from White Collar – I hope you will try this story, but never fear, Peter and Neal are never far from my thoughts and my next White Collar story is progressing nicely.

Disclaimer: Don't own it. If I did, we'd still be in Season 2

Chapter 1

Dean opened his eyes to the dark. It took him a moment to realise that his eyelids had refused his command and stayed stubbornly glued shut, cemented by a viscous adhesive that experience suggested was blood. He scrubbed at them clumsily, the smooth slide of fresh gore on top contrasting vividly with the gummy tackiness of clotted lumps underneath.

Success in freeing his eyes did not bring the revelation for which he'd hoped. Either he was blind or his surroundings were pitch black, unrelieved by even the faintest glimmer of light.

"Sam?"

His tentative enquiry echoed outward and was quickly absorbed by the darkness. He strained to hear a response, a breath, a movement of any sort that would inform him of his brother's location.

"Sammy?" Unspoken worry dripped audibly from his frustrated shout. "Come on, answer me!" The eerie silence that met his desperate command sent tension roiling through him in shuddering waves. "God dammit!" He allowed anger to displace his fear, shoving it down with practiced efficiency.

Sam should be here. Dean knew they were supposed to be together even if he couldn't quite remember what they'd been doing or where they were. He rolled over onto his knees, preparatory to exploring his surroundings, but the sudden shaft of white-hot agony that stabbed through his back arrested the movement, robbing him of the breath necessary to articulate the imprecations that swarmed to his mind.

"Well, crap," he eventually hissed. It appeared that he'd been involved in some sort of fight. That wasn't exactly a newsflash. He had a vague memory of sailing through the air to hit...he wasn't sure what, but that was almost a weekly occurrence, so he could be confused.

Physical pain was a well-known adversary, one he could subdue as necessary, and now his concerns were not for himself. Automatically, he catalogued his injuries, hearing his father's strictures on a warrior having to know his own weaknesses in order to compensate for them. There was nothing that would impair his fighting ability too drastically: a couple of ribs cracked and**,** by the way his shirt stuck crustily to his back, the skin was broken too. His head was still bleeding, just under the hairline, but it was hard diagnosing concussion in the dark**,**since none of the usual vision tests worked, so he decided arbitrarily that it wouldn't be a problem. Neither would the multitude of other bruises and scrapes. He wouldn't let them.

He reached out blindly with his hands, gritting his teeth as another wave of pain surged through him. He had to search the area even though he was almost certain Sam wasn't there. His brother's absence resonated through him, and the emptiness to the room was almost tangible. The dank, stale atmosphere, coupled with the cool, damp earth under his hands, strongly suggested he was in a cellar and, as he searched, the dimensions of the space became clearer.

Dean's questing fingers swept over beetle carcasses, worm castings and small, squishy things he didn't want to identify. But he didn't pause in his search until he brushed against something hard.

"Sam?" His heart lurched for an instant before recognition set in. He'd handled too many bones in his life to mistake the feel of a skeleton. _NotSam notSam notSam_. There was no way Sam could have been reduced to a pile of bones in the short time Dean had been unconscious. _NotSam notSam notSam_.  
>The moldering odor of death clung only faintly to the skull under his hand.<p>

Urgency impelling him onward, he completed his search, reaching two conclusions. The cellar would almost certainly become his tomb unless the spindly wooden steps led up to a satisfactory exit, but more importantly, Sam wasn't here.

It never occurred to Dean that he might be the one missing, and Sam might be searching frantically for him. He knew with absolute certainty that his younger brother was in danger, and that conviction sent fear spiraling out from the center of his being, flooding through him until it tingled in his fingertips.

Sometimes he wondered why they bothered going out on the road looking for trouble since it inevitably seemed to find them and, when it did, it made a beeline for his kid brother. Whether it was the 'shining' that pasted a large "Here I am, kick me now" sign on Sam or some other attribute that attracted them, Dean didn't care, as long as he was there to intercept and destroy anything trying to hurt his brother. Protecting Sam was his job, his responsibility, and the knowledge that he was currently failing in that duty knifed across his heart with a pain that was more agonising that anything his body had ever been called upon to withstand.

He retraced his path to the steps, tactile exploration allowing him to form a mental impression of a ladder with rungs a foot long and two inches wide. He climbed up with some caution, counting the twelve rungs until he reached a small platform at the top, maybe a foot deep. He longed for a spark of light, the smallest gleam to enable him to assess the obstacle in front. He was beginning to loathe the unrelieved blackness with a passion that he usually reserved for the denizens who inhabited it.

He could trace the outline of an opening, and there was even a latch, but no amount of jiggling would persuade the solid piece of wood to open. There was no keyhole, so Dean's best guess was that a deadbolt on the other side was keeping it firmly closed.

"Sammy!" he bellowed, drumming his fists against the door in an effort to make as much noise as possible, then, resting his head against the rough surface, he tried to listen past his own thundering pulse, holding his breath in anticipation of a response.

Unable to make out his own hands an inch from his nose, sound had become paramount, his only source of communication, and every nerve in his body was poised, tense with the need to hear his brother's voice, willing it to happen. But the silence remained as absolute as the dark.

"Sam." The name emerged as a whisper of entreaty commingled with despair, his brother's absence haunting him, burning an aching hole in his soul.

Blood trickled down his forehead again, and he wiped it away absently, the movement breaking his reverie. There was no time for indulging in sentiment. He had to figure out his next move, which meant that, first, he needed to recall what happened. He should be able to remember how it began, the moment should be clear-cut and defined, but he had only a vague sense of passing time.

The darkness swirled around him, and this time he didn't fight it but fed it to the black rage inside, allowing it to penetrate the recesses of his memory. They were in the South - Georgia.

Dean latched onto that slight nugget of information like a starving tiger grabbing the tail of its prey. It was a start, and from there he could follow it, geographically or chronologically, to infer Sam's whereabouts.

His muscles twitched, demanding action and, in obedience to that itching need, he slid down the ladder back to the ground, taking six strides to the far side of the cellar and pacing back again, the repetitive motion offering some relief. He did his best thinking bouncing ideas off Sam. The effortless exchange of facts, theories, sarcasm, and teasing generated a momentum of its own, spinning his brain into a higher gear.

Now he could only hope that an impatient stomp across a space barely large enough to boot a demon would kickstart his clouded thoughts. The darkness at least was a blank background allowing him to superimpose on it the images his mind threw up. He could almost see his brother in Nondescript Motel, Podunksville, sitting on the bed, one long leg twisted underneath him, the other draped over the edge to the floor, staring intensely at the laptop in front of him.  
><em><br>Sam tilted the screen momentarily toward Dean so his brother could catch a glimpse of the large plantation house with classical architecture. "Solemnity, Georgia," he summarised freely. "A mother, her three children and an elderly relative were all killed. The father has been arrested for the murders and is being held in a mental hospital, since it appears he's lost his marbles."_

_"Ya think?" was Dean's only comment, leaning back on his own bed._

_Sam ignored the sarcasm with practiced ease. "Then here they refer to 'the mansion's tragic past,' so, with a bit of digging, I've found several other violent incidents. In '61, the eldest son went berserk and killed his whole family. In the 1940's, there seems to be some sort of accident on the lake where there was one survivor. I think there were almost certainly more episodes, but I can't pin down the specifics right now. However, I'm willing to bet that it all dates back to 1862. When the Civil War was revving up in the area, there was an attempted slave rebellion that was brutally put down."_

_"So some poor bastard of a slave sees his whole family get wasted. He's holding a grudge and getting his revenge by offing any new residents of the plantation." Dean waved his hand in a gesture that indicated that it was a familiar, but sad, story._

_Sam lifted a shoulder in tentative agreement. "It's a working theory," he concurred cautiously._

_"So we find where he's buried, salt and roast the poor son of a bitch. Case closed."_

_Sam was now staring at him skeptically. "When is it ever that easy?"_

_His older brother rolled over on his side to regard him more directly. "Is that Sammy the Psychic speaking, or my brother, the pessimist?"_

_Sam grabbed the first missile than came to hand, a pair of bundled, sweat-stained socks that he'd removed as he reclined on the bed, and flung them in his brother's direction. He didn't bother to follow their trajectory, knowing they wouldn't hit their target unless permitted to do so, but it was a fitting expression of his irritation._

_"Hey, I'm just asking," Dean protested innocently._

_Solemnity wasn't worth the appellation of a town. It was barely a village and it owed its existence to the glory days of the plantation. Now it was fading to a uniform gray of decay and disuse._

_There was no motel, but a chipped and fading sign indicated a small boarding house over the Post Office and, under the guise of university students conducting historical research, they signed in under the incurious direction of the proprietor._

_They had split up to delve further into the background of the plantation and its tragic history - Sam took the Impala, with his brother's reluctant consent, to the nearest town with a historical society, while Dean had the more enviable task of pumping the locals for information over a cold beer. That had proved to be a bust, since the suspicious, yet dull-eyed residents of the bar demonstrated a parochial paranoia of strangers that was stronger than their desire to gossip, so Dean had returned to their room and occupied himself with an inventory of their arsenal._

_Sam returned many hours later with the gleam of scholarly satisfaction in his eyes and reams of information on all activities concerning the plantation - with the notable exception of the slave rebellion. Whether the records had been lost in the grim chaos that ensued or a deliberate conspiracy of silence had blanketed the events, nothing remained except one stark court record that stated, "While the ringleader remains at large, eight leaders of the recent bloody insurrection were hanged this morning."_

_There were no further references to this enigmatic leader or even to where any of the bodies were buried._

_"It doesn't seem like simple possession either. There were deaths in the grounds and everywhere in the house and by almost every method conceivable - drowning, stabbing, shooting, a broken neck from falling down the stairs. Most spirits replay the events of their own deaths, force a macabre reenactment. This is..." Sam searched for the right word, "...random. I don't like it. There's no pattern to the chronology either; the gaps between deaths range from thirty to eleven years."_

_Sam paced restlessly, pausing only once in frustration to slap one of the pieces of paper he'd stuck to the wall. "Spirits are about repeated patterns, but here there's nothing. Time, place, victims - there's nothing predictable."_

_"So, it's not as anal as your average Casper," Dean shrugged unconcernedly. "Doesn't mean we can't kick its freaky ass." He racked the slide of the Glock he'd finished cleaning and threw it to one side as he waggled his eyebrows in illustration of anticipation._

_"Dean, we have no clue what we're up against." Sam threw his arms up in exasperation. "Which means we have no idea what would be effective against it."_

_Dean disassembled the shotgun he had picked up with an ease and speed which would have a marine sergeant drooling in envy. Caution was not a natural trait to him, but he'd learnt to trust his brother's instincts. "Do you think more research would give us answers?" he asked, willing to make the concession._

_He read the answer immediately in his brother's body language. Sam was an open book, his emotions printed on each page in bold letters, and, to the older brother who'd learnt to interpret his cries in the cradle, every twitch of that expressive face spoke volumes. Now the evasive gaze, pensive scowl and the restless shuffle of long limbs broadcast a clear negative, but Sam didn't want to confess the limits of his beloved research._

_With what he thought of as admirable big-brother restraint, Dean didn't force the articulation of that answer, checking the barrel of the gun before snapping it shut._

_Sam fought a spirited rearguard action by positing the likelihood of an African or voodoo connection to the spirit, but it hadn't taken much persuasion on Dean's part to convince his brother that a preliminary daylight reconnaissance would have to substitute for a complete understanding of their potential adversary._

_The next morning, the last echoes of the Impala's muted roar faded into the absolute silence as Dean improvised a parking space on the brown, foot-long grass that had probably comprised the elegant front lawn, complete with croquet set and mint juleps, during the ante-bellum years. There was now only a hint of its former glory as the paint peeled off the corinthian columns that lined the front facade of the building._

_Dean carried their duffel bag over one shoulder, its weight belied by the ease of his movements. The variety of weapons inside compensated for their lack of a specific countermeasure for what awaited them. He also hefted a shotgun in his right hand with deceptive casualness. Sam had lost his taste for that weapon and currently only held the EMF meter and a vial of holy water._

_Police tape adhering to the splintered front doors was a jolting anachronism and a vivid reminder that tragedy had chased all the occupants of this mansion, nipping their heels all the way to the present. At a nod from his brother, Sam gingerly reached out to test the latch, surprised when the door yielded slightly in response to his gentle push. He shifted to a more defensive position; then, at Dean's signal, he exerted enough pressure to swing the heavy wood back. His older brother, as always, preceded him through the opening._

_There was a uniformity to all abandoned buildings, whether they were hovels or mansions, an emptiness that had nothing to do with the quantity of their contents but derived from the ambiance of neglect, the absence of a caring hand that permeated the space. This forlorn dereliction neutralized the grandeur of the large staircase that curved dustily down to the echoing entranceway, and Dean was unimpressed by the faded upholstery of the furniture as his eyes followed the direction the shotgun pointed as he examined the area carefully, every sense alert for the first sign of trouble._

_Yet there was no warning, no gradual escalation of launched objects or even the faintest manifestation of a spectral presence. The EMF meter that had remained stubbornly silent flared to life with a blazing scream, but even before the sound could register, Dean was swept up by an invisible force and hurled through the air. He had time to appreciate the liberation of flying while thinking, "oh crap, this is going to hurt" before slamming with stunning violence against a cabinet. He wasn't gratified to discover he was correct in anticipating the pain, but the sound of his brother's voice crying out his name drove him to struggle to his feet, obeying the instinctive need to stand between Sam and whatever was causing the fear that threaded icily through that one syllable. But, while still on one knee, he was seized again like a rag doll tossed in the jaws of a dog or a mouse batted between the paws of a malicious cat. The soaring sensation ended in an impact that he heard rather than felt. He crumpled bonelessly to the floor, but as the room dimmed into darkness and swirled him away into a vortex of emptiness, he could still hear his brother._

_"Dean...Dean...DEAN!"_

The memory of that pain-drenched, panicked scream impelled Dean across the room and up the ladder before he'd consciously decided to move. The driving need to find Sam would admit no barrier; nothing could thwart that compulsion, the door was already history in his mind. He attacked it as he would an enemy, as he would anything that stood between him and his brother.

Adrenaline overrode exhaustion and pain as fear indistinguishable from fury slithered through his body. He fed the force of his rage by unleashing all the frustrations of the past year that he'd kept harnessed and buried for so long. Fists and feet beat out a vicious tattoo and, as far as he was even aware of it, he relished the clean physical pain.

A steady stream of creative invective focused his strength. He couldn't have said how long he battered at the door, but potential success was signaled by an increasing rattle, a telling give between the frame and the wood. The outside bolt was loosening. The hammering and shouting reverberated round the small space, and he reveled in the noise as it helped block out the memory of his brother's screams.

However, before the destruction of the lock was completed, an injudicious demonstration of Newton's third law of motion sent him reeling backwards, tumbling down the steps. Feeling himself falling, he automatically tucked and rolled, minimizing damage, but still the shock of impact on his already bruised body stunned him momentarily. His breath was harsh in his throat as he struggled to draw air into suddenly recalcitrant lungs, and streaks of light chased across his vision, although they offered no illumination in the eddying darkness.

The dampness of the ground beneath him started to seep through his clothes, and the chill leached away the heat of his fury**,**leaving only implacable purpose. Questing fingers soon found the object he sought, and with the unlikely tool of a skull grasped in his hand, he scrambled back up the ladder, though at a slower speed than he had descended.

He carefully felt for the position that would afford him the maximum leverage, then, using both hands, he slammed the skull as hard as possible against the barrier. The door shuddered, and Dean resumed a methodical pounding. He didn't allow himself to think beyond the immediate goal of destroying the wood in front of him, and he didn't even notice when he fell into the rhythm that he'd last heard in his brother's pain-filled voice.

_"Dean...Dean...DEAN!"_

The skull was disintegrating, and his hands were bruised, blistered, and bleeding, but they proved hardier than the lock - which eventually yielded with surprising abruptness, sending Dean staggering through the opening. Only the fact that his eyes were accustomed to total darkness allowed him to appreciate the faintest hint of light that teased at his retinas. It wasn't enough to reveal details of his surroundings, but it was sufficient to reassure him that he wasn't blind. It also hid the copper smears his questing fingers deposited on the stones as he passed.

Both the brothers had studied the layout of the plantation, and Dean made the correlation between the cellar and corridor he was now exploring and the servants' quarters on the map. He wasn't sure how he had made the transition from the main house to the periphery of the buildings or, now he came to think about it, how he'd been stripped so efficiently of all his weapons. This wasn't typical behaviour for a poltergeist or any other spirit they'd encountered, and renewed concern for Sam brought a cold fist of fear to his gut.

His brother's name shuddered in his throat, but he swallowed it back. He needed to locate Sam, to hear him say something, anything, to drown out the echo of his agonized scream that still reverberated through Dean's ears, but advertising his liberated presence would be counterproductive considering the embarrassing ease with which he'd been sidelined the first time round.

He emerged from the underground tunnel into clear, clean starlight. The moon was absent, and with little light pollution to block its glory, the streak of the Milky Way blazed across the sky, and to Dean's light-starved eyes it was brighter than a sun-drenched morning. It illuminated the threatening hulk of the mansion**,**which he eyed contemplatively, juggling the possibilities for ingress. With no weapons and not even an improvised plan for dealing with the evil that possessed the plantation, he wasn't looking for another confrontation. He just wanted to grab his brother and get the hell out of Dodge. Once Sam was safe, they would regroup, but, for now, discretion had to replace his more typically reckless style of incursion.

The front door was not his first choice of entry, and he remembered Sam explaining that the slaves had their own entrance to the main house so that they could serve unobtrusively, and guests would be unaware of their presence. It had been in the underground passage, and Dean retraced his steps to find it. Without his lock-picking kit, a silent entry would be impossible, but it was worth a try. The door was easy to locate, and it yielded easily, with only a grudging squeak to announce his arrival. It should have been gratifying, but instead, every Hunter's instinct he possessed screamed that it was a trap.

With a mental shrug, Dean decided that sneaking up on things supernatural was an overrated activity anyway, so he might as well proceed. More ominous, to his mind, was the absolute silence in the building. It hovered invisibly around him, then pressed in, cloying and malicious, sucking the air out of the room and choking his lungs, plucking at the hair on his arms and teasing up goosebumps. While the last thing he wanted to hear was his brother still screaming, the complete absence of sound signified a battle lost with no clues as to Sam's eventual fate, and a wave of ice-cold panic washed through him, coalescing into a hard, jagged lump somewhere in his gut.

As he started to move deeper into the gloom, the sense of deja vu that swept over him was so disorienting he wondered if Sam's visions were genetic, but he soon realised that he'd experienced this sensation before in the more mundane, but still horrifying, world of nightmares. The haunting fear of being unable to find his lost brother had once been a vague and unfocused horror, but had recently been brought to him in glorious Technicolor with stereophonic sound courtesy of the Bender family, and he could still taste the terror and despair, and the gut-wrenching fear that he'd never find him. The memory of childhood games of Marco Polo played in so many green-tinged, grimy motel pools would never be the same.

His fingernails dug into the palms of his hands and, drawing in a shuddery breath, he blanked his mind, forcing all of the disturbing images and terrifying possibilities into a tiny box and locking them down tight. He would find his brother, he had to, because any other outcome was unthinkable.

The darkness was relieved only by shadows, but it was enough for him to explore noiselessly, to slip through the dark as an insubstantial phantom in his own right. The silence accompanied him as he floated from room to room, wrapped in the bubble of soundlessness as if he'd exchanged his earlier blindness for deafness. He again felt the overwhelming urge to call out his brother's name, to pop the suffocating stillness, but he was bound to the silence, coerced by the hope of his brother's safety.

Emerging from the dining room, he became aware that light beckoned from down the hallway, not the constant glow of electricity, but the flickering dance of constrained fire. He knew that the answers he sought would be illuminated in those flames, but now he wasn't so sure that he wanted to know what would be revealed. A desperate need to know overcame the almost diametrically opposed dread of discovery. A drop of sweat ran into his eye and, wiping off his forehead, he winced as he rediscovered the cut decorating his brow. For a procrastinating moment, he allowed himself to feel the exhaustion, pain and fear that suffused his being before banishing them systematically. Weakness was unacceptable if he was to do what was needed.

His approach was soundless, a lifetime of hunting enabling him to ease to the doorway undetected and peer through. The mass of candles that adorned the room cast a soft light over the interior, and what he saw sent relief slamming into him so hard it shattered all pretensions of stoic composure. Yet, almost simultaneously, a subtle and completely opposing sensation of horror crawled uneasily into the recesses of his mind and kept him motionless.

Sam, seemingly unhurt, was lounging in a wingback armchair, holding what Dean's extensive weaponry lore automatically catalogued as a Civil War cavalry saber. He had one hand on the hilt and the other near the end of the blade**,**and was turning it slightly back and forth so that the reflected glow of the candles rippled oddly over his face.

Dean was the world's expert in all things Sam Winchester. A lifetime of watching over his little brother translated into a lifetime watching him. At more of a subconscious than conscious level, he was aware of every nuance of Sam's body language, every flex of muscle, curve of bone, shift of posture, and gradation of expression, and, despite the obvious visual evidence to the contrary, an insistent voice protested the identification of Sam.

The tableau might have remained frozen indefinitely if it weren't for a sudden shift of light that illuminated something that surprised an involuntary hitch in Dean's breath, the sound impossibly loud in the stagnant silence that bathed the room. In a move so smooth it was almost indiscernible, the man in the chair was abruptly standing facing him, and Dean was staring into alien blue eyes in his brother's familiar face, despair raging through him like a physical pain.

"Dean, we've been waiting for you."

Okay, so NotSam.


	2. Chapter 2

Chapter 2

Concealment was obviously no longer an option, so Dean pushed himself away from the door, struggling to maintain a facade of cocky unconcern while fear writhed through his belly like a snake. Released from the paralysis of shock and uncertainty, his mind stammered with the overwhelming overload of vital questions that swarmed in confusion, all of them centering around the one thought: _How the hell do I get you out of this one, Sammy_?

His feet moved forward mechanically, though he strategically placed the dining room table between himself and the saber-wielding stranger wearing his brother's body.

"I love what you've done to the place," he commented sarcastically, his mouth also operating on automatic. "The candles, the ambiance. Chicks really dig this stuff. Although I have to say, I hope you have a sprinkler system that works. Smoke's a bitch to get out of the upholstery."

His brain was disconnected from his mouth, and all he could actually hear was the echo of his own voice, commenting wryly on Sam's research. _So the only thing each incident has in common is that there's always one survivor who goes completely, buckets-of-crazy nutso and spends the rest of his life in an attractive white suit that does up the back, admiring the padded walls around him. _

Suddenly those words weren't the slightest bit funny, and it was of the utmost importance to figure out _why_ those people went insane. Did the deaths of their family drive them mad, or were their minds unable to cope with the possession of a malevolent spirit? Maybe said rat bastard spirit tampered with their brains in some way; maybe... There were too many possibilities, none of them remotely comforting, and none of them acceptable in the Dean Winchester book of accounting. Not where his little brother was concerned.

He peered across the solid wood of the table, desperately needing to see something that was genuinely, intrinsically Sam left in his hijacked body, something that would tell him it wasn't too late for whatever rescue he could conjure up.

The pale orange glow of the candles muted the sharp angles of his brother's face, but the cold blue eyes staring back unwaveringly made the few yards that separated them seem like the equivalent of a galaxy away. He swallowed, fighting down the desolation produced by that yawning chasm. Sam was supposed to be by his side, each the shield and buckler to his brother's sword, their own mini phalanx of two, steady and compact, intertwined in purpose. Shoulder to shoulder they should be facing down evil together. But a shield was only useful against external attacks. So how was he supposed to protect Sam from an attack within his own body?

Dean locked the turmoil down enough to concentrate on his next move. There was no time to indulge in wishes and reminiscing. He needed information, and the potential source was in front of him masquerading as his brother. Figuring out what exactly he was facing was his first problem. This wasn't a poltergeist, and it wasn't a demon; the change in eye colour was human, not the murky, poisonous blur of demonic possession.

"So," he smirked. "Lived here long?" _Yeah, Dean, king of subtle. Master of the conversational segue. _Polite conversation was so not his forte, but he just wanted the bastard to talk, to at least verify their suspicions that the origin to their supernatural problem lay in the slave rebellion. It would at least be a start, a wedge to pry open the thorny problem of restoring his brother to his normal, exclusive, _solitary_ self.

Unfortunately, the only response he received was a knowing smile. Dean had seen Sam's full spectrum of smiles, from the reluctant tug at the corner of his mouth that said that although the younger Winchester didn't want to encourage his brother's idiocy, he really was amused, to the rare, full-blown, infectious laugh, but the contemptuous cruelty in the expression currently playing on Sam's face was totally foreign, misplaced; it caused a curl of nausea to writhe somewhere low down in Dean's belly.

NotSam (as Dean had christened him, for lack of a better appellation) moved casually to his left, skirting the corner of the table, but Dean mirrored his movements, just as nonchalantly keeping the solid bulk of the wood between them. For a moment, he felt disoriented, dislocated from his surroundings. It was just so damn hard to focus when memories kept intruding, bubbling up, frothing into his mind. How many times had the two of them played a lighthearted version of this game? Sometimes it had been connected to 'tag', but more often the kitchen table or a sofa had provided a handy barrier to hamper the chase by an enraged brother.

Of course, the last time Sam had stalked him with such furious intent, the younger Winchester hadn't hit the final growth spurt that would see his long legs outpacing his brother's. Now, that second's inattention allowed NotSam to narrow the distance between them, placing him almost in saber range, and Dean was forced to scramble to maintain the status quo, unable to restrain a gasp as the sharp movement send a shaft of pain slicing into his back and along his ribs. His injuries had been forgotten, irrelevant against the enormity of their situation.

_Damn it! _He had to get his head into the game. He couldn't afford to be distracted. Sam needed him focused. But maybe distraction could be a two-way street. For the first time, Dean ignored the impostor and spoke directly to his brother.

"Hey, Sammy. This remind you of anything?" He allowed the memory to overlay the present scene. Of course, that younger, smaller version of Sam had been brandishing a bottle of shampoo, not a sharp-edged weapon, but the similarities were enough to infuse his smile with unfeigned humour, delight shining from his eyes. "Remember the Nair? Man, you were pissed at me."

The figure opposite stumbled, freezing into unnatural immobility. _Gotcha, you bastard! Sam's still in there_. The realisation created a tidal wave of knee-weakening relief, but Dean pressed on both verbally and literally, leaning across the table, though stopping short of actually reaching out.

"Remember, Sammy." His voice was insistent, intent, summoning his brother, pulling him to the surface as if he were a life preserver. "I was laughing so hard, it was all I could do to keep the table between us." Words weren't his forte, but now he wielded them, shaped them, offered them across to Sam as a lifeline, a promise, a bond. For a moment, he thought he saw a flash of familiar hazel before Sam bowed his head, and his eyes were concealed behind a curtain of hair.

Struggle was evident in the stark line of his back and etched in tension in the angle of his shoulders. More telling yet was the fine edge of a tremor in hands still clenching the saber.

Sam's silent, yet clearly profound, fight resonated through Dean's very bones, and every muscle twitched and stung with the need to help. He had sworn his life to protect his baby brother, and the urge to tear apart the person responsible for Sam's pain burned in his veins and ate at his control. Yet that unbearable need to help was thwarted. How could he place himself between his brother and danger when the threat had buried itself inside Sam? All he could offer was support and encouragement, and he continued to speak, although his throat was so tight he could hardly force the words past the constriction.

"You got me back good, though. That was so uncool. You remember, I refused to go to school, but Dad made me - said that I'd brought it on myself, and I could suffer the consequences. You know, I swear that's why Julie Collier broke up with me. I looked like such a dork...Sammy?"

There was an almost imperceptible shift in the figure before him, and his awareness of that change probably saved Dean's life. Honed reflexes allowed him to throw himself backwards as the saber slashed across the table, and the strike that could have disemboweled him merely sliced into his arm.

Pain razored through him, but it was caused more by the bitter disappointment of failure than the laceration. Bile threatened to rise in his throat as he stared into eyes that glowed with chilly blue anger, and Sam's features twisted in amusement.

"He's mine now."

"The hell he is," Dean spat back instantly.

"Why, Dean, I expected you to say, 'Over my dead body' because that, you know, is the plan." NotSam resumed his stalking around the table, and Dean retreated before him. His right hand gripped his left bicep in an effort to staunch the blood, but wet stickiness was seeping through his fingers.

"It seems to me that you had the chance and blew it. Why did you throw me in the cellar?" _Keep talking, you son of a bitch_.

"Kill you while you were unconscious? That wouldn't be...sporting. It wouldn't be any fun either." It wasn't a particularly encouraging response, but at least it was one thing crossed off the list of 'a hundred things Dean Winchester needed to know and didn't.'

"You want fun? Hey, I like to have fun. But circling this table for an hour isn't fun. Let's go cruising for chicks. Ever been in a car?" He kept backtracking, rambling as he probed for another opening, another glimpse of his brother. "Not up for that? How about a game of poker? I'm sure I've got a pack of cards here somewhere."

"Personally, I liked Faro, but Poker would suffice." The voice was Sam's, but the cadence wasn't. There was a lilting pitch to it that Dean associated with the South. It also held an authority and an arrogance that seemed at odds with their previous theory of the ghost of a slave.

"You're a gambler yourself, Dean. Something of a...cardsharp. I like to gamble, but I like my stakes to be high." Those eyes were the blue of a scorching flame, but also of a glacial crevasse. Either way, they held the irrevocable promise of pain, and Dean knew he wasn't going to like what was coming, so he tried for deflection, his mouth still on autopilot.

"Stakes, I like stakes too. Sharp, pointed ones work well, but I also have a fondness for a juicy, medium-rare steak."

"You understand what I'm saying. I'm talking of stakes that make your palms sweat, your pulse race as your heart pounds. Wagers that make you feel alive because you've got something to lose."

This time, Dean didn't respond, half-aware of blood trickling down his arm and dripping off his fingers onto the floor, but more conscious of the hypnotically malicious drawl in the familiar voice.

"I have the perfect wager. We'll play for Sam's soul. If you win, I'll leave, but if I win, he's mine."

Dean felt lightheaded, as if his lungs were too small to supply his body with oxygen. Fury was so utterly entwined with fear that the two were indistinguishable. They threaded and tangled in his guts until they erupted through his chest like molten lava from a long-dormant volcano. "Listen to me, you jacked up piece of shit! His soul isn't mine to gamble with, and it sure as hell isn't yours."

He wanted to shout, to scream his utter revulsion at the concept of Sam's life being a mere counter in a game, but the sheer intensity of his emotions left him almost breathless, and the most he could manage was an almost feral hiss. "You leave him alone or I swear to God, I'll destroy you. I'll send you straight to Hell where you belong."

He could almost hear his brother's whisper, _Dude, Don't piss off the malevolent entity inhabiting my body, _but now he had unleashed the wrath and terror that had writhed inside almost since he'd woken in the cellar, it was almost impossible to reign them back in. Anger was no stranger to him, and restraint was rarely necessary in his line of work. Right now, he really wanted to beat the crap out of something, but that effective outlet was denied him.

At least he had removed the smug look from NotSam's face. For a second, there was a pensive, introspective expression that was so _Sammy, _that he took an involuntary step towards his brother, dry eyes burning as they searched for his presence in every minute variation of countenance, trying by the very force of his will, of his need, to summon Sam back.

But when that azure gaze met his again, it was hard and derisive. "Well, how sweet, he actually believes you, believes that you'll save him." Despite the scorn and incredulity that infused the response, there was also a thread of doubt, a crack in the wall of arrogant self-assurance, so the words intended to torment and belittle ended up reassuring. Sam was not only still in there, but trusted his brother to save him. The knowledge that Sam's faith in him was undiminished was bittersweet, but he swore it wouldn't be misplaced.

Less comforting was the realisation that the spirit could clearly access Sam's thoughts and presumably his memories. Dean was given no time to absorb the implications of that revelation. NotSam had obviously decided that the time for polite conversation was over. Maybe Sam's confidence in his brother identified him as too much of a threat to toy with.

With a move made effortless by Sam's long legs, the possessed man vaulted onto the table, standing poised on the top, saber extended,

"Oh, come on, that's so cheating," Dean protested with his usual flippancy, although he didn't underestimate the imminent danger this new stance offered. "The game is played _around_ the table. Get with it."

"Do you want to know the real reason I didn't kill you earlier, Dean?"

No, he really didn't, but it wasn't good manners that kept him silent but the hope that the asshole would reveal pertinent information in his monologuing.

His lack of response was clearly taken as an invitation. "Earlier, Sam was in shock from my...commandeering his body, and he was in no shape to appreciate the piquancy of your death."

"I'm going to smoke your ass, you sick bastard," Dean grated out. Pain rolled through his chest, hot and molten at the thought of that evil piece of shit wrapped round his brother's gentle soul. His hands had started to shake, whether from blood loss or from the anger that slithered through his blood like an amphetamine, he wasn't sure, but he crossed his other arm tightly across his body to hide the movement.

In the face of his defiance, those alien eyes sparked cold blue hunger sending flame licking along his skin with the threat of future consumption. The message was clear - Dean was nothing more than a sirloin for the carnivorous spirit to slap on the grill.

"I want him to feel it." The words were confided softly, invitingly compulsive. "To experience your death at his own hands, watch the last drop of blood still and congeal as your heart stops and your eyes glaze over sightlessly. I'm going to suck in and savor every morsel of your dying, and he will taste it all. What feeds me will destroy him."

The words wrapped around Dean in chains of visceral horror, holding him fast, but the threat to his brother broke the thrall. "You're kidding, right? Have you met my brother? If you kill me, you'll really piss him off. I mean, seriously, he's got the whole mild-mannered alter ego thing going, but you really don't want to make him mad. It's not pretty. He'll rip you to pieces from the inside."

The entire situation was skyrocketing light years beyond unbearable, but he had to get that message across to Sam. _This isn't your fault, and if the worst happens, just promise me you'll keep fighting_.

Then, because it wasn't hard to anticipate what was coming, and he'd rather meet in on his own terms, he kept prodding, twisting the tiger's tail. "Of course, that was your other mistake. If you wanted to indulge in some serious ass-kicking, I have to tell you, you possessed the wrong brother. Sam will tell you, I can take him any day of the week, always have, always will. It's one of the perks of being the oldest."

It was true, but more properly in was a half-truth disguised as its big brother. At least nine times out of ten, he could take Sam while sparring. Fighting had been elevated to a doctrine in his mind at an early age as he recognised it as the key to keeping his family safe, and bar brawls had provided a wealth of practice. People could be so touchy about losing their money.

However, conditions now were not exactly routine. He was unarmed, and NotSam was clearly experienced with the saber. More significantly, Dean was handicapped by his reluctance, if not inability, to hurt his brother, while his opponent was hampered by no such qualms. Their goals were diametrically opposed.

Further contemplation was cut off by the long-awaited attack, the silent, deadly descent of body and saber. The blade sparkled and flared, catching the candlelight as it danced in savage, slashing circles, but Dean didn't watch it. The awareness of whom he was facing slammed into his chest like a blow, but ingrained training allowed him to avoid the blade. He had no weapon to parry an assault, so his only concern was avoidance. In fact, he quickly realised that the soggy silver lining to the whole intolerable situation was the impossibility of hurting his brother. It enabled him to focus on his own survival.

As he dodged thrusts and cuts with agile footwork, his confidence grew. He _knew_ this. Sam and he had trained together with both wooden swords and Kendo shinai, and while the intent behind this battle might be the spirit's, the body was still his brother's. He could read Sam's choice of attack in the shift of his weight, the dip of a shoulder. It was so subtle as to be invisible to anyone less literate in the younger Winchester's body language, but this slight telegraphing, coupled with his superb reflexes, afforded Dean enough of an edge to keep him more or less in one piece.

His world had narrowed down to the slide of a foot, the lithe twist of torso, the smooth flow of retreat. There was no time for thought; the sword spun too close, the offense pressed relentlessly, mercilessly, and he had to react intuitively, moving fluently without actually consciously attending to each action. He dodged around chairs and sofas, hugged close to walls, allowing such obstructions to impede his adversary's sword swing. Such shrewd tactics might keep him alive.

Of course, staying alive was not the same thing as remaining unscathed. Minor miscalculations had allowed the tip of the blade to slice along ribs and across his forearm. He could hear his father's admonition, _If you're fighting with blades, you're going to get hurt. Accept you're going to see the colour of your blood, and move on. Hesitation is fatal. _

His father's voice got more strident as the fight progressed, strangely blurring the line between memory and present, training and survival. _Keep your stance tight_,_ don't let your guard down, _duck, weave_, expectations and assumptions get you killed, _fall back,_ it's about speed, timing and balance. _It was getting harder to maintain his focus, to remember that this was only the physical shell of his brother, and it wasn't hard to figure out why. The evening's entertainment had taken its toll. Steady blood loss tended to have a deleterious effect on the body's capacity for endurance. He would never quit; he'd fight for and against his brother until his last breath, but all it would take was one slip, a zig when he should have zagged, and he'd be sushi.

He needed to force his opponent to make a mistake, and for that he would rely on the patented Dean Winchester technique of pissing off the bad guy. Previously, the silence had been almost complete, punctuated only by the whisper of a slicing blade, a grunt of effort and the shuffle of nimble feet, but now Dean contributed a selective mix of taunts and insults.

"Is that the best you've got? Come on, I'm not even trying here...Did you knit with that thing when you had a body of your own?... Why don't you let Sammy drive for a bit, he can at least hit the broadside of a barn... You've got soft in your old age; you're only good for pushing Granny down the stairs."

The efficacy of his plan was undeniable - the saber swings were becoming wilder - but he was starting to doubt its wisdom as the pace and violence of the attack increased. He was hard pressed to continue his multitasking – to dodge, gibe and maintain the smirk that his brother had always assured him was infuriating. _And you said I had a one-track mind, Sammy._

Then he saw the opening he'd been waiting for. NotSam overextended on the cut, and Dean was able to move in to block the back swing, forearms blocking above the elbow, then, grabbing his younger sibling's wrist, he gave it a practiced twist, turning the hand back and down and forcing the saber to drop. He kicked it nimbly away before continuing the maneuver into a take down. However, NotSam rolled out before Dean could complete the hold, and the fight resumed as hand-to-hand combat.

For the first time, Dean took the offensive, driving his adversary back with a flurry of kicks and punches. This was an area of both talent and expertise for him. Natural speed, agility, strength, and a compact frame combined with extensive training to make him virtually unbeatable in this arena. Youthful high spirits and an excess of energy had set the brothers sparring for fun just as frequently as had their father's decree, and it was the very familiarity of the act that meant Dean's greatest strengths were also his greatest weaknesses. The awareness of his dilemma was swiftly hammered home. A swift roundhouse followed by a sweep sent the taller man reeling, Sam's greater height a handicap, but Dean automatically fell back on the habits of their youth and hesitated, not following up his advantage, unable to deliver a coup de grace.

They were too evenly matched for him to bring down his brother easily and painlessly, but protecting his brother was too deeply ingrained in his character, too inscribed on his soul for him to premeditatively inflict the damage necessary to take Sam down, especially when he had no clue what he'd do even if he rendered him unconscious.

This restraint might be detrimental to his health, since NotSam clearly suffered no similar scruples. Dean blocked a blow to his throat that could have killed him if it had landed, and a sinking, sick feeling gathered around his heart and trickled down into his belly. Exhaustion suddenly swamped him as the emotional toll of the night drained his energy as quickly as did the physical toll. The room slithered around him, spinning away as each candle blurred into its own star, forming a beautifully complex but bewildering pattern of lights. He blinked frantically to clear his vision, but the moment's inattention cost him.

Aware of an approaching blow, he threw up his arm to block, realising too late that his brother's hands were no longer empty, recognising the glint of silver as the dagger hit the bone of his forearm with a jarring impact. The only immediate sensation was one of shock, but that exploded through his brain in a coruscating shock wave of splintering intensity. A kick to his midsection slammed him into a wall, and then all the pain caught up with him, as if the impact broke something open inside, allowing a vast flood of agony to inundate his senses. The effect was so sudden and dizzying, his knees gave out, and he slid to a sitting position.

"Sam!" The name was torn involuntarily out of a place deep inside him, the faintest hint of betrayal prickling involuntarily just under his skin. Sensing rather than seeing the knife drawing nearer, he struggled to rise, determined it wouldn't end this way. He refused to die at his brother's hands.

The attack never came. The other man backed away, blade falling from nerveless fingers. Dean drew in a ragged gulp of air and scrubbed a shaking hand across his face at the sight of his brother standing at his feet, his eyes clenched shut and face drawn in pain.

"Sammy?" he queried, hoarsely, tentatively. Every muscle in his body tensed for a moment that seemed to stretch into infinity before he got the confirmation he sought, but when it came, he almost wished it hadn't. Horror dominated the unfocused hazel depths when they opened, and Dean's heart clenched so hard in response it felt like his entire chest was collapsing.

"I can't...Don't let me...please..." Sam choked out. His haunted gaze sought his brother, needing the strength and reassurance that had anchored him his entire life. Dean was helpless in the face of that desperate appeal, understanding it despite its incoherence and unable to deny it. Bleeding, bruised, and still collapsed on the floor, he nevertheless encouraged his kid brother to draw the security he needed, keeping his gaze steady and supportive, despite the fear that crawled hidden just behind his eyes.

"I get it, kiddo, I do, but I'll fix this, I swear. Just hang in there." There really wasn't a tactful way of saying, 'don't go irretrievably nutso.' The stark hopelessness in Sam's eyes swung back in favour of desperate courage, bolstered by a faith in his brother that had never been unwarranted. He nodded jerkily, a wordless, sacred promise given and accepted on both sides.

Dean's throat tightened with frustration, tense with helpless empathy as he watched Sam's struggle to maintain control through his fear and exhaustion.

"I need your help, Sam." He offered his brother a focus. "What is it, who is he?"

"Myal." The effort to speak was followed by a spasm that shuddered through Sam's entire body. "Run!" he whispered thickly.

The surreal flicker between blue and hazel, storm clouds fighting the sky, rendered the warning unnecessary. Dean didn't wait for the struggle to resolve itself. From his position on the floor he hooked his left foot behind his brother's ankle then delivered a hard sidekick to the knee with his right. It was a blow that could cripple, but he judged it carefully to only temporarily disable. It should heal within a week, but for the next day, at least, NotSam would not be engaging in any more agile fencing duels or swift pursuits of any kind.

It was an advantage Dean desperately needed. His back was a white torch of pain from the repeated knocks to his ribs, and the wound in his arm was bleeding copiously, the viscous liquid dripping off his fingers and forming a little pool, glistening thickly in the candlelight.

Sam gave a tight cry and fell to the ground, clutching his injured appendage. Dean's expression was grim and determined, but he still watched with concern, wanting nothing more than to erase all the pain his brother had suffered that night. However, fairly sure that his brother had lost the battle for control of his body, he didn't approach him. He'd learnt at an early age that ignoring gut instincts got you killed real fast. "Sorry, Sammy," he whispered, scooping up the knife before forcing himself to turn away, trudging reluctantly back into the dark.


	3. Chapter 3

Thank you to all those who have taken the time to review. It is greatly appreciated. There is a slight dearth of Sam in this chapter, but he will come into his own soon!

Chapter 3

At first, Dean staggered aimlessly, his mind focused solely on what he'd left behind rather than on any destination, so it was more by accident than design that his path led him back to the front hall where the whole nightmare had begun. The moon had now arisen, and a shaft of cool light drifted through the murky window panes. His steps dragged to a halt, and he stared blindly out to where he knew the Impala waited for him in the dark. He wanted nothing more than to bundle Sammy into the back seat, stand on the gas pedal, and put not only the town of Solemnity, but the whole state of Georgia, hell, the whole damn South, in his rearview mirror.

Since the spirit appeared bound to the plantation, maybe leaving would tear it loose. However, it was equally possible that ripping it free would shred Sam's brain in the process, disintegrating it from within. Maybe the best idea was to book while he had the chance, do some research on the lead Sam had given him, and return more prepared for the hunt, but his mind shied away from the very concept. He told himself it was because he had no idea what the spirit would do balked of its prey, how it might take its frustrations out on his kid brother. In reality, he could no more bring himself to abandon Sam than he could tear off his own arm. The unswerving loyalty to those he loved, which was the hallmark of his character, counted that as rank desertion.

A renewal of sharp pain in his forearm made him realise that he was clenching his fists, and he consciously tried to relax, shoulders slumping under the weight of the responsibility he carried. He watched incuriously as a drop of blood splattered onto the bare floor, the bright crimson lost instantly in the dusty gloom. That was the first order of business. NotSam would come looking for him before long, and blood spots were his own indelible, morbid, bread-crumb trail.

John Winchester had always insisted on a thorough knowledge of a locality before any attempt at hunting, so both brothers had memorised the floor plans of the plantation, but an awareness of where each room was didn't tell him what the last residents had used it for. The electricity had been turned off, but personal belongings had not yet been removed, so it didn't take Dean long to find a bedroom with sheets that he efficiently tore into strips with the aid of the knife he'd removed from Sam. His arm and the slice over his ribs needed stitches, but that would have to wait.

Dispassionately, he wrapped his injuries. It was awkward to work on himself, but it wasn't as if it hadn't happened before when Sam was at college and the two remaining hunters had taken separate jobs. Now, however, it merely emphasized his brother's absence, the sensation a conduit through time to those years of piercing incompleteness when the very core of his being had free fallen into a vast, dark abyss of loss and loneliness and he'd drifted directionless.

He swayed, cold sweat prickling his back, and his legs threatening to fold up underneath him, as the true drain on his body and soul hit him hard. Without bothering to pick up the stained cloth he'd used to mop up the worst of the blood, he walked unsteadily to an area that offered two possible exits, before sliding down in a corner, pulling his legs up to his chest and resting his head on his knees. His whole body ached from trying to contain the brittle fear, the fury, and the loss that swirled inside, battering at his walls.

The silence was overwhelming, allowing dismal thoughts and feelings of desperation to rampage unchecked through his mind. "We really screwed the pooch on this one, little brother." He spoke aloud, needing to dispel the suffocating hush that blanketed the room and to unhook the talons of painful memories lodged in his heart.

It was so tempting to give in to the tidal wave of oblivion that threatened to pull him under, but he knew its promise was merely an illusion. It would tumble him dizzily before slamming him relentlessly on a beach, pulling away to leave him vulnerable and exposed. He couldn't afford that. Sammy couldn't afford that.

It was the memory of the raw panic in his little brother's expression that pulled him back from the edge; the jolt of lacerating adrenaline it engendered banishing the lure of rest. Dean had understood the emotion bleeding from those hazel eyes. Sam was not afraid for himself. The desperation-filled plea may have remained largely unspoken, but it had been unmistakable all the same. 'Don't let me hurt you. Don't let me kill you.' Dean had always been incapable of refusing a heartfelt appeal from his brother, and this time had been no different. His promise may have been tacit, but its comfort had been absorbed, Sam's eyes conveying the depth of feeling to his brother. He had to keep them both alive, nothing less was tolerable.

_So, to summarize: I just have to figure out who or what is possessing Sam, discover a method of depossessing him without causing him to go Daffy Duck, destroy the son of a bitch, leap tall buildings in a single bound and_ ... He allowed his head to fall backwards to thud on the wall behind him. _This sucks out loud. In stereo_.

At least he now had a starting point. Sam had given him a lead, a direction to investigate even if it currently made no sense. He was familiar with Myalism and Obeah from his time in New Orleans, but knew little more than it was a slave religion brought over from West Africa. Obeah was far more in their line of work, since it often aimed specifically at harming individuals at the behest of others. He scoured his mind for more details and found a vague recollection that Myalism had been strongly connected to slave rebellions. That corresponded with their suspicion that the deaths all originated with the revolt. However, it didn't mesh with Dean's conviction that they were not dealing with the spirit of a slave.

Somehow he always ended up with more questions. Why had the spirit attacked them? Previously, its prey had always been the occupants of the plantation. There were no casualties among the staff or people investigating the murders. Had the damn hitchhiker sensed their mission and launched a preemptive strike, or was there more involved? _And, Jesus, why you, Sammy? Me it throws against a wall, but you it gloms onto like a new best friend._

More information was called for, and since he was lacking both their usual resources and his geeky, research-loving brother, he needed to improvise. The best place to start was with the residence itself. In his experience, the one thing that tended to remain unchanged about historic houses was their libraries, and if he was lucky, maybe he could find a source on Myalism or at least the plantation records on the slave revolt.

He struggled to his feet, a new wave of pain stalling his progress for a heartbeat. His legs felt as if they'd mutated from flesh and bone to rubber, but with grim determination, he forced them into motion, burying all feelings of discomfort under the satisfaction of an established plan.

Faint sprinkles of pastel light teased through threadbare drapes, heralding the promise of dawn and making the job of navigating the warren of rooms easier. He slipped hunter-silent through the maze, all senses alert for signs of Sam, torn between a desire to avoid another violent confrontation and an inescapable need to see that his brother was still alive and functioning.

He found the library without difficulty and with no sign of any movement other than the endless dancing motes of dust drawn up into the vortex of his passing. As he eased noiselessly through one of the double doors into the spacious chamber, the light through the high windows illuminated shelves of leather-bound volumes lining every wall - thousands upon thousands of almost identical books. _Well, crap_.

Dean was quite capable of doing his own research. No son of John Winchester could skip learning the basics of investigation. He knew how to compile sources and skim through endless pages of scholarly drivel, navigating around interminable diversions to the isolated nugget of wisdom that would save their asses. But, whereas Sam relished the time spent poring over crinkly parchment and derived tremendous satisfaction from piecing together the component parts of a mystery, to Dean it was more of a necessary evil, a task he could magnanimously leave to his younger, more academic brother.

Here the comparative level of skills was irrelevant. It would take days to find anything significant amongst the sheer quantity of material in the room, and time was a luxury he just didn't have. Sam just didn't have.

For a moment he stood irresolute, the magnitude of the task too daunting, especially given his preference for more action-oriented activities. "Where the hell are the CliffsNotes when I need them," he grumbled, frustration at this latest hitch coiling the tension inside to new heights. In the forlorn hope that there would be some obvious organisation to the stacks that would somehow quickly point him to the weird shit section, he started browsing through the titles nearest him.

The concentration he expended on the project did not rob him of vigilance, and he had scarcely worked his way down to the middle of the first wall when his head snapped up and he spun around, sensing Sam's presence nearby. There was no faint sound drifting to preternaturally sensitive ears, no subtle waft of air that spoke of approaching danger. He could simply feel his brother. It was a connection forged in the hottest fires of adversity, tempered under the stress of sacrifice and purified in the crucible of selfless devotion. If he'd given it any thought, Dean would have labeled it as a 'big brother thing'. He just knew when Sam was in trouble, and that invisible bond pulled him in the right direction. It had saved his brother's life countless times, and now it would save his. As the instinct in his gut unfurled, he dove for the only cover the room offered - a marble pedestal supporting a bust - and slid behind it like a batsman gliding home for a triple just as NotSam burst through the door.

The injury to his leg had clearly forced him to abandon archaic weapons in favour of those more modern and far-ranging, but equally lethal. The first shot disintegrated the well-sculpted ear of a long-dead president, while the second buried itself in a book, sending dust wafting into the air.

"Hey, dude, this is a library. You're supposed to be quiet in here," Dean hollered. "This is like a major breach of those etiquette rules you're always trying to make me follow." The memory of those many occasions, teasing his brother by inviting the censure of straight-laced, blue-haired librarians by inappropriate behaviour, sent a slither of pain uncoiling in his gut.

Possibly Sam responded to the same image, surging higher inside his captor, because the gunfire ceased. However, the younger Winchester's light tones were still marred by the lilting drawl. "You know, Dean, I thought you would have taken the opportunity to abscond. It would have been the sensible thing to do. But Sam knew you would never leave without him. He also knew you'd show up here. I just had to wait."

A quick rush of anger stiffened Dean's spine, and his hands balled into fists, white-knuckled against his thighs. He was practically vibrating with the force of his emotions, the necessity of holding his desire for violence in check. It was so difficult to remember, never mind accept, that his brother's knowledge of him was being used against them. But more devastating was the message that was flaunted blatantly in both their faces. The body-snatching rat-bastard could not only force Sam to physically dance to his tune, he could effectively mind-rape him, pillaging his memories, rifling through his personal thoughts. Dean's murderous rage escalated at the thought of grimy fingerprints besmirching his baby brother's pure soul.

Dean didn't need to violate Sam's mind to follow his train of thought; he'd always been inherently attuned to his sibling, and now he could practically feel the misery that leached from his younger brother - the hot, sharp guilt that sliced him to the bone. The hijacking son-of-a-bitch had just informed Sam that he'd betrayed his brother, set Dean up like a rat in a trap, primed and ready for extermination, and that there was nothing he could do to prevent it.

Dean had every intention of utilising their third-party delivery system to inform him otherwise. He leaned his head back against the cool marble trying to take the pressure off his back while listening intently for any indication that the other man was moving towards his location. "He's fighting you every inch of the way though, isn't he?" He kept his tone as irritatingly smug as possible, which was something of an achievement, since he had to struggle to even keep it steady. _I know you're still in there kid, and I know you're not going to quit. This isn't your fault_. "My brother's something of a control freak, and he never did like sharing."

It was all he could offer Sam - words richly saturated with memories, heavily loaded with their own personal meaning to anchor his brother in an unforgiving sea when he remained adrift from even his own body.

Maybe there _was_one more thing he could offer. "It must be crowded over there. I mean, Sam's head's just crammed with all sorts of crap. He just sucks up facts like they're going out of style, and he just never stops thinking. I keep telling you, you picked the wrong brother. There's a lot more room over here, so why don't you give this accommodation a try?"

It was a forlorn hope, emanating from a desperate desire to spare his brother more pain, from his lifelong mission of protecting Sammy. He risked a peek around the pedestal, needing a glimpse of his brother, needing to gauge the impact of his proposal.

Sam was standing as still and white as an alabaster statue himself, his shoulders stiff and his spine board-straight, yet despite the lifeless stance, tension radiated from him, and his eyes were two dark holes in the stark planes of his face. The gun hung forgotten by his side. Dean's heart ached for everything his brother was going through. "Sammy?" He edged further out of cover, still crouching low, prepared to duck back at the first threatening move.

Again, whatever internal battle was being waged was swiftly resolved, and NotSam clearly emerged victorious, a small gloating smile twisting his lips. "Actually, Sam says that you're smarter than you like people to think, so I think I'll pass on your gracious invitation."

_Well, shit_. Under any other circumstances, Dean would have loved to hear that confirmation from his brother, but he knew that if people thought he was more brawn than brains, they tended to underestimate him, and he needed all the help he could get in this situation. However, the entity wasn't going to learn that his answer caused any degree of dismay.

With his cockiest smirk, he fired right back. "Damned straight I'm smart...and handsome to boot. I tell you - this is the body you want." It was a lost cause, and he knew it, but he couldn't help but push harder, the carrot hiding the stick.

The gun tapped lazily against a denim-covered leg. "Do you want to know the real reason why I chose Sam?"

Dean tried not to appear too eager, shrugging a sore shoulder. "Yeah, sure, enquiring minds want to know and all that."

He couldn't drag his eyes away from the figure in from of him, and it wasn't just natural wariness. His mind seemed to skate between the fear and horror of seeing evil given form - his brother's form - and an illogical relief that only Sam's presence could bestow.

NotSam didn't respond immediately, his stillness predatory and utterly foreign to Sam's body, which was always so animated - giving the illusion of action even if remaining in one place, and more often fidgeting with whatever was in his hands.

Dean was suddenly intensely aware of the small sounds that deepened the silence, the subdued rattle of gusting wind on aging windows and the subtle creak of wood expanding in the warmth of the morning sun. The room threatened to spin away from him, and he gave himself a sharp shake to get things back into their proper focus. He felt lightheaded but heavy-hearted, blood thundering unpleasantly loudly through his veins.

The cold, hard blue eyes trapped his gaze, and he struggled to maintain the illusion of indifference. The words, when they came, were low and rough, quite dissimilar from Sam's light, even tones. They attempted to coerce, to pull Dean into complicity with some dark, unknown purpose. "Sam is the fulfillment of the long-denied promise of eternity, the awaited completion of familial sacrifice to higher design."

Dean scowled at him. "I forgot to bring my Cryptic-to-English dictionary to the dance. Do you want to try that again in words of one syllable?" He couldn't let the bastard see that his words were affecting him, pulling on the edges of a horrified understanding that danced tantalisingly just beyond reach.

"Sam is...special," the entity continued as if he hadn't spoken.

"Yeah, sure, I've got that. Wrap him up and I'll take two." Dean shifted his weight slightly. He was still half-kneeling on the ground, lacking the stability or desire to make it fully to his feet. His eyes flickered to the second door on the opposite wall of the library. It was his only chance for a getaway, but under the present circumstances, he'd be road kill before he made it halfway across the room. There was a possibility that Sam might intervene and spoil the gun's aim, but to rely on that intervention was totally unfair to his brother. Furthermore, he worried that each time Sam fought his way to supremacy and seized back control, no matter how minimal, it weakened him. He dragged his attention back to the cerulean glare that regarded him complacently, arrogantly.

"He's strong. All the other minds crumbled around me, insubstantial in their resistance, but too feeble to withstand, and in their disintegration, my destiny went unfulfilled."

"Yeah, well, it sucks to be you." Dean's insides were a fiery ball of churning emotions, each twisting and flexing in the struggle to rise to the top of the morass. The only one he dared acknowledge was his old friend, anger, and he granted that free rein. "And I can tell you, you've struck out again, you son-of-a-bitch, because I _will_get my brother back, and then I'm going to send your freaky ass back to hell where you belong."

The rancorous smile merely deepened, sliding secretively across narrowed lips. Again, he held Dean's stare captive, his voice confiding. "When you so unwisely trespassed on my domain, I could have flicked you aside with a mere thought as you would swat an annoying insect. In becoming corporeal again, I sacrificed some of my power, although I believed myself amply compensated by the pleasures of the flesh. Imagine my surprise when I discovered that Sammy was holding out on me. He has powers beyond anything I could have dreamed when I was mortal, and now they are mine."

All Dean could think of was Sam's visions, and there seemed to be no reason for NotSam to covet those. In fact, although Dean would never wish pain on his brother, an incapacitating headache would come in handy right now. He hadn't witnessed his brother's one act of telekinesis, and since it had never been repeated, had gladly dismissed it as a freak incident. A movement in his peripheral vision jerked his attention upwards, and comprehension dawned at approximately the same speed as the descent of the one-eared presidential bust towards his unprotected head.

His response was heartfelt, succinct and supremely unhelpful, "Shit!"


	4. Chapter 4

Plantation Dominion Ch 4

A lithe twist coupled with a warding block deflected the brunt of the impact, but he couldn't prevent a cry of surprised pain as his shoulder absorbed the worst of the collision. The presidential nose shattered irretrievably on the hardwood floor as Dean simultaneously measured his length beside the dwindling statue. He was fully exposed, unable to protect himself from a physical or psychic attack, but the expected gunshot never came. Instead, a hoarse groan from Sam echoed his own.

The sound was sufficient to instantly dispel Dean's momentary disorientation, yanking his attention around to his brother as a needle spins quivering to point to true north. Sam had fallen to his knees, and his anguished posture was reminiscent of the agony inflicted by the visions that plagued him, but this unnatural stillness was different.

The sight literally tore the breath from Dean's chest, the need to help in some way, even if it was only to provide support, ripping through him like a razor. His little brother's well-being was indelibly inscribed on every fiber of his being, yet he was also aware that Sam was buying him this reprieve at considerable cost to himself, and he couldn't squander that sacrifice.

His feet dragged, heavy with reluctance, and his eyes never left the forlorn figure frozen by the entrance, but he succeeded in reaching the side door. There he came to an abrupt halt, leaning wearily against the frame, unable to force himself beyond the range of his vision, still aching with the frustrated need to protect.

He watched as Sam's head came up, but although the colour of his eyes was concealed under the overhanging bangs, he could tell that his brother had lost his foothold, falling back into whatever sanctuary still existed in his mind.

For once, there was no quick quip on Dean's lips. He couldn't summon the energy to speak, but he met the half-hidden gaze with cold resolution and the promise of future retribution. For a moment the tableau remained unbroken, stretched taut by mutual intent, then a book shot through the air, shedding dust and paper in the force of its trajectory. Dean ducked easily, and with a final nod of acknowledgment for battle lines redrawn, slipped out of the room.

"You running away again, Dean?" NotSam taunted. "I thought you were a warrior. Warriors never retreat in battle."

Dean smiled grimly to himself. He was too experienced to be affected by the insinuation of cowardice. He and Sam probably spent more time sprinting frantically away from the objects of their hunts than they did actively pursuing them. It came with the territory, and they had even developed a standing joke for it. Dean shared it with his brother now. "I'm not running away," he called back, allowing amusement to colour his voice, "I'm advancing in the opposite direction."

NotSam's heavy limp allowed Dean to easily outpace him, though he wavered between attempting to lose his pursuer completely and keeping him at a comfortable distance, far enough away to avoid paranormally flying objects but close enough to know exactly where he was. NotSam had the advantage of several lifetimes of intimate familiarity with his surroundings, so while Dean craved time to reassess the situation, he decided he preferred to circumvent another ambush.

Unsurprisingly, NotSam appeared to catch onto his plan, and the uneven thump of his steps and muttered imprecations soon gave way to ominous silence. It appeared that the memory of another childhood amusement would be forever marred as the morning deteriorated into a sick game of hide and seek with life and sanity as the prizes for winning.

It was a game that John Winchester had actually encouraged each time they had rented property in a brief halt in their transient lifestyle. "When there's nowhere to run, and you can't fight, find a place to hide." Exploring every niche and familiarising themselves with every nook and cranny might save their lives in the event of an attack, so it was with an obscene sense of familiarity, despite the changed stakes, that Dean flitted wraithlike from room to room. He was unsure if he was supposed to be hiding or seeking. His gut instinct told him that NotSam had stopped moving and was poised like a spider in a web, trusting his prey would eventually fall into his trap.

Dean allowed the silence to envelop him once more. Wisdom dictated that he, too, remain still, forcing the hijacking bastard to meet him on his terms. However, fear for Sam drew him on, kept him foraging for help of some kind. An additional force of urgency was exerted with every minute counted down on the invisible and unspecified timer in his head. Sam's time was limited, he could sense that, and the knowledge screamed at him, allowing no rest.

In the last year, they'd spent almost every waking moment together, and he was conscious of the absence by his side, the aching awareness that was exacerbated by the realisation that, in this situation, his brother was not his ally. He had to outthink not only the evil son-of-a-bitch who'd hijacked Sam, but his brother too, and it was a daunting prospect. It wasn't Sam's intelligence that worried him, although he had the greatest respect for his brother's mental acuity. He knew exactly how smart the youngest Winchester was - after all, he'd been the one to teach him in Sam's formative years. He'd taught him the rudiments of reading before kindergarten and exclaimed proudly over each 'A' on bashfully presented report cards. Sam sucked up knowledge with the thirst of a true scholar, manipulating it to his purposes with the ease of a sharp mind, but, of the two of them, Dean had the edge as a strategist. He might lack Sam's encyclopedic recall, but he had absorbed tactical maneuvers at his father's knee years before his brother even knew evil existed.

Dean paused at the entrance to the next room, attempting to drag his full attention back to his surroundings. On a regular hunt, he was focused, his priorities clearly established - protect Sam, defend the innocent, and destroy the evil. Now distractions clawed at this concentration, shredding his attempts to reassemble his scattered thoughts. The truth was that he was a brother before he was a hunter. The two weren't supposed to conflict. Sensing no imminent danger, he stepped inside, quickly placing his back to the wall, assessing the sparse furnishings with a jaundiced eye. Mechanically, he rifled through the linen-filled drawers of a dresser before turning to the double doors of a closet. With practiced caution he jerked it open, ready for an attack from within.

The sight of their duffle bag, carelessly thrown into a corner, caused his heart rate to jump, and he spun around, suddenly fearing a trap. The stillness remained unbroken, and after a minute, he turned back and, with sudden decision, picked up the bag, wincing as he slung it over his bruised shoulder. Acting on impulse, he retraced his steps to a bedroom he'd already explored, seeking more familiar territory in which to hunker down and discover what tools serendipity had dropped in his lap.

The familiar quiet rasp of the zipper was oddly comforting, and he reached inside the duffle to pull out his Glock, hefting its compact weight in his hand. It fit snugly, offering a promise of security that Dean wanted to believe. He could plan a subtle campaign of attack, but he usually preferred a full-steam-ahead, head-on confrontation. He loved to blaze into a situation, trusting in his ability to improvise under pressure and out-shoot if not out-think, any opponent. But this was Sam. With a shudder of revulsion, he threw the gun back in the bag. The thought of facing his baby brother down the barrel of the automatic generated a wave of nausea that caused his stomach to recoil. "Don't point a gun at someone unless you mean to use it." It was one of the many precepts of weapon handling that had been drilled into Dean at a very young age by his father, and the truth was that he had no intention of firing on his brother.

Maybe the greater course of wisdom lay in taking the gun and trusting in his own marksmanship to temporarily disable if necessary, allowing him to keep his unspoken promise to Sam. However, in this case, wisdom could go and hang itself from the nearest tree. He knew only too well how a swift movement could change a well-intentioned flesh wound to a crippling injury or sever an artery, leaving Sam bleeding to death in his brother's arms. That was a risk Dean simply wasn't prepared to take. If anyone got shot that day it would have to be him.

Therein lay Dean's greatest problem. Sam, and by proxy, NotSam, had to know that he could never shoot his brother. The threat would instantly be known for the bluff it was. He wasn't just fighting against Sam's extensive, eclectic knowledge, he was fighting against Sam's knowledge of _him_.

He rolled his head around, trying to ease the headache that constant preternatural alertness and unrelenting tension had built up, but the persistent pounding continued unabated, and he wondered if his brains were leaking out of the hole created by his first encounter with the non-corporeal NotSam. Absently he scratched at the dry blood caked to his forehead and contemplated how totally screwed they were.

Since Sam had returned - and wasn't that his favourite euphemism - they had slid smoothly back into their old partnership. Their relationship might have suffered from an initial bout of hiccups, the occasional awkward jostle of readjustment, but on the hunt they had quickly folded themselves effortlessly down established creases in a seamless fit, like an old, well-loved map put away since no directions were needed.

Although Dean would rather yank out his toenails with a rusty pair of pliers than admit it, that perfect synchronicity was one of his greatest joys. Nothing in the world was like that; the feel of his brother at his back, moving in a rhythm of their own, matching pieces of a puzzle, thoughts and senses attuned, the bond between them nearly telepathic in its intensity. While hunting, words were unnecessary between them, communication silent yet complete, a fleeting glance or gesture conveying volumes. Mirror images, shadow and substance indistinguishable.

But if Sam could so easily anticipate every move his brother made on a hunt, how could Dean outmaneuver him now? His first instinct was to return to the library, but Sam would know that, so he should stay clear, but Sam would predict that his brother would know that he'd know so...crap, that kind of circular reasoning just ratcheted his headache ten points up the discomfort scale, from brains simply leaking to a pyroclastic flow of gray matter. Convoluted thinking just wasn't his forte, he would simply have to go with his instincts.

Rooting deeper into their mobile armory, his questing fingers grasped the object he was desperately hoping to find - their father's journal. Allowing his external radar to continually sweep for danger, he opened it up, his fingers clumsy in their eagerness as he riffled through the familiar pages. He was certain he'd seen the word 'myalism' buried in the vast mishmash of arcane lore. It took him a few minutes to locate it - one small paragraph and a symbol lodged between a binding spell and exposition on Acheri.

Dean skimmed through the information quickly, then read it through again. Initially, disappointment with the scarcity of facts swelled hot and bitter, but desperation mated with experience, and in those fertile conditions, an inchoate idea was spawned, then it budded and branched.

With sudden decisiveness, he selected a variety of items with sure fingers: a vial of holy water, a package of salt and a veritable pharmaceutical delight of other compounds, all thrust deep in his pockets. He didn't expect any of them to be effective, but boy scouts had nothing on the John Winchester school of preparedness. As a final thought, he picked up the Glock again and ejected the clip, pocketing it before throwing the empty gun back in the bag. Just because he had no intention of using it didn't mean he should leave the weapon loaded and ready for NotSam.

A forceful shove of his foot left the duffle bag mostly concealed under the bed. Sam would have recognised the fiery blaze in his brother's eyes and the intense set of his bearing, the stark line of his shoulders pronounced beneath the thin black cotton of his t-shirt. Dean Winchester was done running. It was time to take the offensive.

He was fairly sure that he knew how to depossess Sam, or was that dispossess NotSam. He was also aware that there were two giant holes in his inchoate plan. The hitchhiker wouldn't sit there agreeably while Dean went through the laborious process of evicting him and, given the newfound discovery of Sam's abilities, Dean had no idea how to restrain him effectively. Secondly, the ritual, while saving his brother, would return NotSam to the non-corporeal form in which he had so easily kicked their butts on their first encounter. However, minor details like this wouldn't prevent him from saving Sam. He hadn't never let his brother down before, and he wasn't about to start now.

A cautious glance showed him that the upstairs hall was still empty, at least it was void of visible life, but Dean could feel a faint buzz like static electricity sizzling along his nerve endings that confirmed that the house wasn't as cold and vacant as the silence would suggest. After all these years, his instincts were almost as accurate as an EMF, and he followed where they led on noiseless feet. He was supremely conscious of his empty hands. He never went on a hunt unarmed, although some of the weapons they carried were too bizarre to be recognised as such. But he had nothing that would impact NotSam while he was safely ensconced in his shanghaied body; Sam would bear the brunt of any attack.

"Come out, come out wherever you are." The alien tinge to the voice he knew better than his own caused his heart to slam against his chest.

"Yeah, I'll just slather my ass in gravy and ring the dinner bell," he muttered sardonically in response.

It appeared the spider was no longer prepared to wait for its prey, but it also revealed its own position in the process. "You can't wait forever; time is running out for your little brother. His soul is offering its last sporadic jerks before sinking forever, and his suffering tastes sweet."

The taunting words delved for the roots of Dean's worst fears and, for a brief second, he closed his eyes against the molten nausea of the image. This wasn't demonic possession. Whatever it was, the longer it had Sam, the more it insinuated itself into every cell. When Dean opened his eyes again, all signs of weakness were gone, and they glowed with the green of burnished determination.

A quick consultation with his inner blueprints told him that if he snuck down the dark, twisted steps reserved for the slaves and back up the main stairway, he could get behind NotSam and surprise him. However, not even the softest, most carefully placed foot could prevent the creaks and squeaks that issued from the boards of worn wood. Dean believed the sound was too muffled in the dark space to be heard in the left wing where NotSam currently stalked. At the bottom, he sacrificed stealth for speed, knowing his opportunity was limited.

A sense of futility, the nagging fear that all his efforts were ineffectual, was exacerbated by the realisation that he was literally going in circles. It was the third time he'd been in the entrance hall. The first time he'd lost his brother, the second time he was running away from him, this time he was running toward him. It was progress - of a sort. In the daylight he could identify the cabinet he'd been slammed into. The sturdy wood seemed to have escaped unscathed from their intimate encounter. The only casualty was Dean's back, although the plaster on the wall behind appeared cracked and dented as well. An incautiously deep breath furnished a painful reminder of the impact on his ribs.

He gazed up at the sweeping length of the staircase with some trepidation. Not only did it seem infinitely long, but its gently curved expanse offered nothing by way of cover. He'd be totally exposed as he ventured up the open steps. Never one to shirk an unpleasant risk, he approached with no further hesitation, keeping close enough to the wall to leave smears of blood on its cool surface as he brushed by.

Gravity pulled disproportionally on his legs, making each ascending step he took laborious. His body demanded it be allowed to rest, at least long enough to catch his breath, but he subdued his harsh breathing and forced leaden feet onwards. His eyes remained glued on the hallway above, but there was no flicker of movement. There was also not a whisper of sound - which was more alarming than reassuring. Dean's instincts screamed 'trap,' but he pushed on regardless, seeing little choice in the matter. His heartbeat was thundering so fast he could feel it in his throat as he paused on the last step, bracing himself for a quick peek round the corner. He expected to be confronted by the towering form of his brother, but the corridor was empty, devoid of any movement except the frantic dance of dust motes in a shimmer of sunlight that suggested the recent passage of something large.

Foreboding crawled along the skin of his arms, raising the fine hairs in warning. Soft footsteps slowed to immobility. Uncharacteristically irresolute - neither retreat nor advance seeming viable options - he remained locked in position, his only movement the spasmodic clenching of his left hand.

He didn't flinch as the figure materialized in front of him. Despite the suddenness of NotSam's appearance, it held an inevitability that placed it beyond surprise. If his brother had been a few feet closer, Dean might have relied on his speed to jump him, but NotSam had judged the distance to a nicety. However, Sam only had to gain ascendancy for a second to give Dean the opportunity to overpower him.

"Olly olly oxen free," he murmured, completing the age-old childhood ritual, despite the bile in his throat. He wished it were as easy to summon Sam into the open. But blue eyes still glowered at him with smug malevolence. His brother's huge hands were empty, but that was probably irrelevant under the circumstances and was no indication of safety.

"I'll take fucked up situations for 600, Alex."

NotSam's arrogance seemed to falter slightly at this bizarre pronouncement, although no vestige of the younger Winchester appeared in those crystal-blue eyes. The puzzled tilt of his head reminded Dean irresistibly of the androids in Star Trek confounded by Kirk's illogic, and for a fanciful moment he imagined expanding the hunter's arsenal of weapons against ancient evil by baffling them with 20th century popular culture references. Dean Winchester was the man to wield such a weapon, especially the more profane examples.

"Yippie-ki-yay, motherfucker," he hazarded. "Beam me up..." His trivia cut off abruptly as his peripheral vision picked up a vase hurtling towards his head, and he ducked to avoid it. "Curses, foiled again."

NotSam seemed as lacking in humour as most of the evil things they faced. He didn't move forward as Dean had hoped to provoke by baiting him with his idiocies, but stood unyieldingly threatening. "Your attempt at avoiding your fate has been entertaining, but is ultimately doomed to failure. Your brother can't help you anymore, and this is the second time he's delivered you into my hands."

For once, Dean had no smart-assed comment, and all he could offer was a half-choked snarl. "Don't bet on it. You don't know jack-shit about me or my family." The spirit might have Sam's memories, but that was different from living the experiences.

NotSam smirked at Dean's denial. "Oh, but I do. I know everything. I can tell you what you had for breakfast yesterday, or why you didn't go to your prom. I know your father sacrificed himself to save your worthless hide, and you can't forgive yourself for that. You hate to be alone and your greatest fear..."

Brothers always knew how to push buttons, and demons always twisted the truth to suit their purposes. This evil son-of-a-bitch appeared to be the worst of both worlds. But Dean had no intention of waiting politely for the spirit to finish dissecting his character with verbal scalpels. He stepped forward and hurled a sachet of salt specially designed to release crystals along its flight path and burst upon impact. NotSam recoiled automatically at the sudden move, but the container never reached its objective, boomeranging back at an heightened speed.

Suddenly, hide and seek had morphed into Dodgeball, another John Winchester-approved activity, applauded for its ability to sharpen the reflexes. However, unlike the nice round balls of schooldays, these objects could be as large as him and change trajectory mid-flight. Luckily, there was a dearth of detachable objects in the hallway - several paintings, two wooden chairs that flanked a small table upon which sat two vases and some framed photographs - although those that survived the initial impact could be retrieved with a thought and reused as projectiles.

NotSam appeared to only be able to control one object at a time, but these could approach from any direction and at blinding speed. Dean relied on his hearing as much as his eyes for advanced information to dodge and evade the relentless barrage. Superb athleticism and almost prescient reactions allow him to avoid the majority of shots in the initial salvo. However, at times it was impossible to evade the viciously sweeping arc of wood or china, and he could only fend it off to the best of his ability, minimising damage to head and torso. He weaved and feinted, contorted and flexed, spinning and shifting continually.

A sheen of sweat covered the face of the telekinetic, testimony to the effort he was expending, but Dean was in far worse shape. He was hours past exhaustion, fighting through injury and blood loss by the numbing graces of adrenaline, sheer bloody-minded stubbornness and an absolute refusal to quit on his brother.

Sweat and blood stung his eyes, contributing to the blurring of his vision. Each breath was a hoarse burst of noise as he struggled to draw more air into burning lungs. He hoped for a reprieve as the furniture shattered, but blunt-force trauma was replaced by the threat of impalement and evisceration. A shard of pottery whistled through the air, flashing toward his throat, and he only just jerked out of the way in time, shielding his eyes as the fragment smashed into lethal splinters on the wall next to his head. There was no time for self-congratulations as its twin slashed through his shirt, grazing his ribs before meeting a similar fate.

He sensed rather than saw the next missile, reeling backwards out of its path. Caught off balance, he stumbled, the wall abruptly halting his descent to the ground. The tumble left him dazed and vulnerable.

"Sam!" The cry was torn from him. It wasn't a plea for help or an appeal to Sam's consciousness. The name was ripped from his private, most intimate soul along the tenuous link he still maintained with his brother. The recognition _in extremis_of the most important person in his life and the bond they shared.

Whether Sam responded in some way to his cry or NotSam enjoyed toying with his prey, there was an appreciable pause which allowed Dean to regain his feet before the attack resumed. He'd tried several times to retreat back to the stairs, but each time had been driven away by a focused assault. Now he made a quick break down the corridor, diving under an incoming table leg that had splintered into an effective stake that would have skewered him like a giant shish kabob, and slithering round the corner and onto the steps.

He took the stairs like he was going for Olympic gold, but he knew it wasn't fast enough. He recognised the tingle in his extremities and the sharp burn up his spine, just before a phantom push between the shoulder blades sent him airborne. He tucked into a ball, but it wasn't a natural fall, and a shockwave of pain exploded through his back as he landed hard. He rolled down the last two steps, slamming his head against the bannister at the finish. The world lost colour and everything slid sideways. Instinctively, blindly, he lurched, crawled, staggered, simply moved any way he could, away, ricocheting through the nearest doorway, a loose pinball with no goal except to escape from the cruel laughter. It faded as he increased the distance between them, but he didn't stop, couldn't, until he'd lost himself deep in the slaves' quarters.

There, his legs gave way, buckling like overcooked pasta, collapsing him onto his knees. He tried to steady himself with a deep breath, but the movement sent a wave of pain and weakness through him. Nausea spiked, but he forced the bile back down, gritting his teeth as he waited it out. His head remained bowed for several minutes, minute shudders the only sign he was still conscious. When he straightened, his face was set like steel, grimy and bruised with shockingly red streaks striping it vertically.

Blood dripped off his chin onto his collar, and he brought up a hand to explore his head, feeling the wetness on his fingers and the tangle in his matted hair. Looking at the gleaming wetness coating his palm, he gave a nod of grim satisfaction.

He now knew what he had to do.


	5. Chapter 5

Chapter 5

NotSam's bragging had reminded Dean of a crucial fact. The spirit might possess Sam's knowledge of his brother, but that knowledge held a vital two-year gap which contained the experiences that could surprise and defeat him.

By tacit mutual agreement, those two years had remained a taboo subject between them. Dean had kept a surreptitious eye on his brother during that period and could fill in the broad picture of his activities, but he had never been tempted to ask for details. It had taken a long while for the grief of Jessica's death to ease from Sam's eyes, and Dean never wanted to bring it back with an inadvertent reminder. There were other less altruistic reasons for his caution, but since he regarded introspection with the same fondness he held for a coven of witches or a pack of ravening werewolves, these were reasons he seldom contemplated. However, in the occasional moment of weakness when inhibitions were lowered by pain, fear or alcohol, he might have admitted, at least to himself, that he didn't ask because he was afraid to hear about the wonders of Sam's 'normal' life, about how little he missed his brother, about how he craved to return.

Denial wasn't just the longest river in Africa, it was also the backbone of Dean's coping strategies, and if ignoring the hell out of those two years helped dispel the pain of that time, then he was happy to wrap all those memories up in a box with a pretty red bow, drop it in a hole six feet deep, salt and burn, then shovel a shit-load of dirt on top.

Perhaps more significantly, Sam had never asked how Dean had spent those two years, and Dean had never volunteered any information. His pride prevented him from admitting just how much he'd missed his little brother, and his protectiveness precluded him from discussing the lives that might have been saved, the injuries that might have been avoided if Sam had been at his back. Maybe that's why Sam had never asked; he didn't want answers any more than Dean did, or maybe he assumed that the hunter's life had remained basically unchanged in his absence, one gig very much like another, varying only in intensity of threat and speed of resolution.

In truth, it had been a learning time for them both. Sam had emerged strong and independent with greatly expanded horizons, while Dean had gained more practical skills, evolving into a consummate hunter. His experiences in New Orleans were particularly relevant, since there he'd made the acquaintance of Obeah, kissing cousin to Myalism. The ritual he'd witnessed there and fully intended to recreate was potentially deadly, especially to the practitioner, but that was NotSam's second mistake. He'd made it abundantly clear that Dean had nothing to lose. Sam's soul was mired in evil, sinking fast, and soon would be irretrievable, and the elder Winchester had always known he wouldn't long survive his brother. Sam had been the center of his world, his responsibility, his to keep safe, since the fire so many years ago. The Stanford years had left him hollow; Sam's death would create a hole so large, the ensuing implosion would be messy. He would save his brother or die trying.

He made his stand in the kitchen, the last place a sane man would fight someone with the power to move objects with his mind and therefore, hopefully, the last place Sam would expect him to be. The number of potentially lethal projectiles would have a homicidal telekinetic salivating. Dean hastily disposed of the knife block and barbecue tools out of the window on the grounds that it was unnecessary to tempt fate.

The kitchen had been modernised, although an old wood stove sat on one side of the room opposite its electric equivalent. An island in the middle of the room provided more counter space, and from a cupboard underneath, Dean pulled out a large bowl. This time, he would be totally prepared for the ritual before he confronted NotSam.

With deft hands, he started to gather the ingredients he'd need, well versed in such preparations. From an early age, his small fingers had mixed herbal concoctions in his first efforts to assist his father, before they'd graduated to molding silver bullets and pulling triggers. Now he followed the instructions from his father's journal, first shaking out a bag of grave dirt into the bowl, followed by a small flagon of rum. The next item was slightly more difficult. The potion called for gunpowder, something he lacked, but he understood that it wasn't really the chemical composition of the potion that was important - it was the ritual significance behind it, so the propellant of modern bullets should be equally effective.

He emptied the clip he'd taken from the Glock earlier and skillfully pried off the copper**-**alloy**-**jacketed lead bullet from the brass cartridge case, pouring out the small brown granules of cordite. He watched as they floated on top of the alcohol for a minute before gradually sinking down to mingle with the dirt on the bottom. Now for the key component - human blood. _Three guesses where that's coming from, and the last two don't count._

Blood magic was nothing to mess around with. The life energy behind it was elemental and, especially when coupled with willing sacrifice, the biggest mojo there was. It was also a balancing act of Niagara tightrope walking proportions. The more blood shed by the practitioner of the spell, the more potential the magic had, but as the magic grew stronger with every gory drop, the donor grew weaker until he lost control of the spell - in which case, the backlash would probably kill them.

Dean had already bestowed a liberal portion of his blood throughout the mansion in scatterplots of droplets and Rorschach smears - an indelible record of each encounter with the malevolent hitchhiker. He was too familiar with the symptoms of blood loss to mistake them: the cold sweat that soaked through an already-damp shirt, the pulse that hammered frantically against his breastbone. Yet he would substitute the hemoglobin in his veins with relentless determination to save his brother. It wouldn't be the first time he'd operated on sheer stubbornness, and with Sam's life at stake, it was all the motivation he needed.

With a quick slash, he cut into a vein in his forearm, careful to minimize damage to nerve and muscle. He watched with detachment as the blood welled up startlingly red before streaming in thick rivulets into the dirty mixture. For a minute, he allowed the blood to flow unchecked into the bowl, until the contents swam a hazy red in his vision, then he wrapped a strip of cloth around the injury, gripping it tightly. His head hung heavy against a rush of dizziness, and a sudden surge of nausea forced its way up his throat. If he'd eaten in the last twenty-four hours, he'd almost certainly have lost the contents of his stomach. The knowledge that NotSam in his human form had drunk an equivalent concoction and slaughtered his family to provide the final ingredient sickened him more than any physical sensation.

Slaves had performed the rite originally in the belief that it would confer immunity from white men's bullets or at least reincarnate them in Africa. NotSam had added the power of family sacrifice, seeking immortality in a dangerous time, but something had gone wrong, and only his frustrated and furious spirit, imbued with greater than normal abilities, had hopped on the train to eternity.

Dean wasn't sure how the slave rebellion factored in to the story. Maybe NotSam had engineered it as a way to conceal the murder of his family, but perhaps more likely, the slaves, furious at the foul perversion of their ritual, had interrupted it in some way and prevented its completion. Since then, the spirit had been seeking what it had long been denied - a corporal existence - and it had torn apart every family in its grasp in an effort to complete the ceremony.

Dean pulled up his torn and stained shirt and, with a grimace of disgust, dipped his hand into the bowl, then painted the symbol he'd found in his father's journal on his chest, where it dried sticky and cold. That would prevent the dispossessed Civil War spook from hopping from Sam into him as the nearest available billet. The Winchesters would be off limits, unoccupiable, officially out of the possession business.

He shifted onto one knee, pushing to his feet - a simple move he'd performed successfully ever since he was a toddler - but this time, the room spun around him, depositing him back on his rear end. Gasping like a landed fish in an effort to retain consciousness, he tried again. He didn't have time to pander to this weakness. He was under no illusion that there'd be any more chances. He'd always felt responsible for his brother's well-being, but seldom had Sam's life so clearly been poised on the knife-edge of his own actions. Dean wrapped that responsibility around him like a cloak, drawing strength and determination from its weight, accepting its warmth as a sacred trust. This time, he locked his knees and braced himself against the island until the room stopped gyrating and separated itself into its constituent parts. The bowl suddenly looked absurdly far away, and he wondered idly if his skyscraper brother dealt with that phenomenon on a daily basis. Keeping a hand on the cabinet in the hopes of maintaining his orientation, he bent down cautiously and picked up the bowl.

Unsteadily, he shuffled to the door to trace the symbol on the chipped paint work, then he retraced his steps to duplicate it on the other exit. Once in the room, NotSam would not be able to leave of his own volition. He would be trapped. However, sealing himself in with his possessed brother would be more suicidal than helpful unless Dean could find a way to subdue the other man, so he moved on to the next portion of his plan.

In a closet along with an anachronistic washer and dryer, he found what he was looking for - a broom. He stood on the head and with a strong yank that reverberated up his arms and viciously into his back, it separated easily, and he was left with a four-foot pole in his hands. Gauging distances between floor, ceiling and cabinets, he twirled it experimentally. The wood was rough under his fingers, threatening splinters, but the heft was comfortingly familiar.

This was a talent his brother knew nothing about. The second month after Sam left for college, John Winchester had scheduled a brief sabbatical. Without the grounding that watching out for his younger brother provided, and sliced to the bone by Sam's desertion, Dean's behaviour on the hunt had become reckless in the extreme, natural courage morphing into supreme unconcern for his own safety. Not willing to lose his remaining son and using a wound in Dean's leg – the boy's third injury in as many hunts - as an excuse for some down time, John had visited a friend who happened to be a martial arts expert. Tom Henrick had offered instruction in a variety of nontraditional weapons and, desperate for a distraction from the gaping hole by his side and in his heart, Dean had chosen the bo staff. It had been a whim, the bo's similarity to a pool cue had appealed to his sense of humour, and on a more practical level, he'd recognised the usefulness of an additional method of beating off vengeful dupes in the uncertain world of hustling.

Unsurprisingly, he'd had proved to be as natural at wielding the bo as he was at plying the cue. Although he couldn't achieve mastery in the few weeks they stayed, it proved a useful method of self-defense, although more so against humans than the antagonists they usually faced, so he hadn't employed it since being reunited with Sam.

Not wanting to telegraph his intentions, he pushed the handle of the broom back into the head, rendering it back into an inoffensive household cleaner. Preparations were complete, but he sensed something was still lacking. He needed an extra edge, an element of surprise to trump the spirit's extrasensory abilities - a split-second advantage of distraction before NotSam thought to use his telekinesis.

Seeking inspiration, he started to rifle through the cabinets. A long piece of clothesline went in one pocket and some matches in another. He found his brainstorm in a drawer beside the sink. A neatly folded pile of linen, brightly coloured with the musty odor of long-term residence, seemed to offer the possibility of a fresh bandage to replace the previous blood-soaked rag. However, the cloth proved to be an apron, and he was about to discard it when something about the pink, floral patter stayed his hand. Maybe Sam's knowledge of his brother could be used to his advantage. He slipped the garment over his head, tying it loosely around the back with a wry shake of his head. Picking up his makeshift weapon, he hoped he looked as ridiculous and inoffensive as he felt at that moment. _Dean Winchester, in the kitchen with a broomstick - and don't forget the apron_. He was ready. He started to whistle a wobbly rendition of Metallica's 'Some Kind of Monster', while moving the broom back and forth, careful not to dislodge the head prematurely.

Although capable of long periods of poised stillness in the midst of a hunt, Dean hated waiting, and inactivity while his brother was in danger was intolerable. Moreover, with the lull in action, his adrenaline had drained away, and he was paying for the previous surge of exertion with a slump of exhaustion. Only desperation provided enough energy to keep him on his feet in blatant disregard of gravity and his own waning strength, and the broom was slowly becoming more of a crutch than a weapon.

His mouth was too dry to whistle for long, and he reverted to humming, hoping to steady his own nerves and not too obviously draw his adversary into the room, but as the minutes ticked by, doubts scudded through his mind, dark and grim. What was the point of the perfect trap if your prey declined to spring it? _Shit, double shit, with a steaming helping of shit for dessert._ For a moment, Dean contemplated going after his possessed brother, maybe trying to entice him into the kitchen, but he stood no chances outside his ambush, and his death would doom Sam too, so he compromised with himself. _Five minutes. I'll wait five frigging minutes, then move to Plan B._

The fact that Plan B had as much substance as a wisp of smoke meant squat. He'd improvise his way through Z and through any other alphabet that existed if he had to in order to save his brother. He glanced at his watch, but it wasn't working. Between supernatural phenomena and the repeated beatings it took, that wasn't an unusual occurrence. He chalked off another minute in his internal tally, ready to take the broom hunting with him, when he sensed it - not the comforting familiarity of his brother's presence, but the icy touch of dead fingers caressing from beyond the grave.

His heart skidded over a beat, like a hydroplaning vehicle, before resuming with the jolting thud of a car wreck. He braced himself to see Sam's face again, knowing he couldn't afford to see his younger brother in those beloved features.

The door burst open violently, and he caught a glimpse of a wielded sword, but he was, for now, a safe distance away and he concentrated on the floor he was so industriously cleaning, crooning a new song, "Feelings, nothing more than feelings..." Peripheral vision afforded him a peek at his gobsmacked brother, eyes bugged wide and jaw hanging limply, a reaction that was so utterly Sam that Dean was hard pressed not to laugh.

This was the split-second advantage that he'd been seeking. He pretended to stumble, but in actuality he stepped firmly on the broom head, neatly removing it before springing forward. He acted to eliminate the most immediate threat, striking Sam's arm and sending the sword clattering across the newly swept kitchen tiles. But the excellent reflexes of host or ghost blocked the second blow to the head.

The great advantage of a bo staff was the extended reach it offered, but telekinesis had a far greater range, so Dean had to keep pressing NotSam hard enough for him to forget his alternatives. A flurry of strikes and feints drove the hitchhiker back against the door. He managed to catch the end of the bo, but Dean had the advantage of leverage. A deft little circle and NotSam was forced to let go or suffer a broken wrist. Dean followed up with a thrust to the solar plexus, momentarily doubling his opponent over. An overhead strike was still blocked, but unlike swords and other bladed weapons Sam was familiar with, the bo had two effective ends, and with a quick movement of one hand, Dean reversed the broom and slammed the other end across his brother's head.

The whole encounter had taken less than ten seconds. Sam folded up, and Dean instinctively tried to catch him, but shaky legs were unable to support both their weights, and they collapsed awkwardly to the ground together. The impact with the floor drove the last of the air out of Dean's already struggling lungs, but he wasn't even thinking about the lack of available oxygen as his fingers scrabbled frantically for a pulse in his brother's neck, relief hitting him with the force of a jackhammer when he found it.

For almost a minute he lay there, reacquainting himself with the luxury of air, allowing the steady thump under his fingertips to reassure him. The urge to close his eyes and yield to the weariness was overpowering, but his job wasn't even half complete. He patted Sam's shoulder absently. "Sorry, kiddo. I hope you've still got some of that superglue left because I might have knocked a few marbles loose."

Extricating himself from beneath his brother took more effort than he would have believed possible, and it was obvious he wasn't carrying Sam anywhere. He hooked his hands under the younger man's armpits and, propping the door open with one foot, starting dragging him through it. His cracked ribs sent up a howling complaint worthy of the hardest rock music he played and accompanied by staccato stabs from his abused arms, but he proceeded inch by inch. "Next time you want a salad," he panted grumpily, "I swear there'll be no cracks about rabbit food. You weigh more than that freaking bull we hauled across that car park in Des Moines."

Luckily, their destination was close by - an empty pantry with absolutely nothing in the way of missiles for a pissed-off spook to employ mid-dispossession. He lowered Sam gently to the floor, cradling his head to avoid another blow. Leaving one hand there for cushioning, he rolled his brother over onto his front, a ridiculously difficult task. He tugged the plastic cord from his pocket and securely lashed Sam's hands together behind his back, palms facing outward. "Not that I want you to get the wrong idea or anything," he continued his monologue, "Bondage has never really been my thing, although there was that waitress in Tulsa..." The words spilled out in a meaningless stream of drivel. It was merely sound to break the silence that worried at his eardrums. The absence of sound had always signaled unutterable loneliness to him, and he needed to both reassure himself and comfort his brother during the indignities forced upon him. As an afterthought, he also bound Sam's feet.

It was an extraordinarily unprepossessing place for the culmination of a life and death struggle - walls of whitewashed brick and a floor of hard**-**packed dirt with barely enough space for the prone figure of the younger Winchester. The only external source of light came from a dirt-smeared, foot-square window high on the outer wall. Yet Dean was oblivious to his surroundings, his attention uncompromisingly directed towards Sam. The occasional twitch of his brother's extremities indicated that the interval of uninterrupted options was nearly over. There could be no more procrastinating.

Stripping the silver ring off his right hand, he placed it in the identical place on his brother, although it required a twist to get it past the final knuckle of Sam's larger hand. "Ut quod est mei." Next he removed the leather cord wrapped around Sam's wrist and rolled it onto his own. "Ut quod est tui."

A faint groan from Sam emphasised his return to consciousness. With a wary glance, Dean completed the final part of the initial ritual. He lifted the amulet over his head, something he had never voluntarily done since he'd first placed it there. He wore it in the shower, in bed, the midst of battle or passion. He didn't know what protection the charm offered, but he believed in it. It might be a coincidence that he was the only Winchester never to be possessed, but that wasn't its main value to him. For a very unsentimental man, the amulet held great sentimental value, and it was a tangible symbol of the bond between the brothers. In Sam's absence, it had been a daily reminder of his failure to protect his younger brother, but also of his hope of Sam's eventual return.

Now, he clasped his brother's right hand in his and draped the necklace over both. "Ut quod est nostri," he intoned. Sam's fingers spasmed suddenly, becoming rigid in his grasp. They were too hot, as if his brother were feverish or was being consumed by fire from within - a thought that caused Dean's heart to try to hammer its way out of his ribcage.

Releasing Sam's hand, he turned his own palm up, then, with scant ceremony, drew his knife diagonally from the base of his fingers almost to his wrist. He always kept his knife razor-sharp, and the skin parted easily with less of a feeling of pain than of dizziness, the blood that raced to fill the gap a vortex that tried to pull him down. Awkwardly tugging at his brother's bound wrists with one hand, he exposed Sam's right palm, and with a quick mute touch of apology, he sliced a matching stripe.

At the touch of the blade, the body underneath his jerked, and unintelligible muttering built in intensity. With a grimace of regret at the necessity, Dean shifted to place a knee in the small of his brother's back to restrain the increasingly agitated movements. "Sanguis mei sanguinis. Frater mei animi. Socius in bello et pace." The words were full and rich in his mouth as if they held a physical substance that should have been choking, but instead they flowed with the liquid force of a cataract. He wasn't sure if the power they exuded, pungent and ozone-sharp, issued from the truth they embraced or whether some external factor was at work, namely the blood that they shared, that ran thick and deep between them. Blood was life, but also death, and the copper stench of it hung heavy in the air. Through some trick of the light, the room seemed bathed in its reflected lurid red glow.

Dean reached down to grasp Sam's hand again, and as his gory palm touched his brother's, it was as if a circuit was completed, releasing all the pent**-**up power of the ritual, and all hell broke loose.

sn sn sn sn sn sn sn sn sn sn sn

Latin translations:

Ut quod est mei – that which is mine

Ut quod est tui – that which is yours

Ut quod est nostril – that which is ours

Sanguis mei sanguinis. Frater mei animi. Socius in bello et pace – blood of my blood, brother of my soul, comrade in war and peace.

For those potential historians among you, the ingredients in this ritual (not the Latin which is mine) are factual. This was in fact a ritual performed by Myal slaves for the reasons given. History and Supernatural – who knew!


	6. Chapter 6

Chapter 6

Sam screamed, a pain-filled and shrill sound, and his back arched in an involuntary spasm of agony. A matching yell exploded from somewhere deeper than Dean's lungs, but it died strangling in his throat, unable to pass the constriction there that also throttled any possibility of breathing. As his hand closed on his brother's, the sensation of fire leapt up his arm, searing along every nerve, branding each cell in passing with a unique stamp of pain until his whole body was consumed from the inside by fiery agony. Every muscle seized, his spine locked rigid and all thought was driven from his mind. He couldn't have recalled the next words of the ritual through the haze of pain and confusion to save his life.

Any other man would have reflexively released his grip, but Dean knew fire, was experienced in its devastation, and his instinctive reaction was to hold his brother tighter. _Baby Sammy was so heavy in his arms, his solid weight unbalancing, threatening to tear out of his four-year-old grip, but Dean clutched him closer to his chest, breathlessly whispering, "It's okay, it's okay," to quiet the distressed whimpers emanating from the bundle at the unaccustomed rough treatment. The smoke burnt his young lungs as terror burnt in his heart, lending him the strength to follow his father's directions that would forever be indelibly engraved into his very being - save Sammy._

_Then, inexplicably,__ Sam was taller than he was, too large to carry from danger, so he shoved, herded, hustled,__ and basically forced him any way he could from the room where the ceiling boiled, mercifully now concealing the horror than lay there. His brother was resisting, calling out something broken and hoarse, but the words were lost in the scorching heat that roasted his back. Despite that, Dean wasn't leaving until Sam was out of that deathtrap._

Now, invisible tongues of flames licked ravenously up his long bones, lapping at the marrow inside, but either the effects were wearing down or he was becoming immune to them, because he became aware of his surroundings again to find himself lying perpendicularly against his brother, his upper chest pressed against Sam's back, whether to protect, comfort or restrain he wasn't sure, and in unconscious imitation of his four-year-old self he was muttering, "It's okay." His right hand, still clasping his brother's, was slick with sweat, while his left was fisted into Sam's shirt. Both his arms were cramping with the force of his grip.

There was no opportunity to eased strained muscles, because, as if connected to his own reactions, Sam's struggles abruptly veered from pained writhing to a concerted attempt to free himself. He bucked and heaved, powerful muscles bunching, all the time spewing a variety of invective that at any other time would have entertained Dean with its creativity. Although he caught an elbow in the face, given Sam's bound condition, it wasn't too hard for Dean to keep his brother's possessed form face down in the dirt.

NotSam kept attempting to bring his knees up under him to gain more leverage, but Dean kicked them back every time. But all his focus was concentrated on combating the residual pain and subduing his struggling brother. The remainder of the ritual had been shoved violently to the back of his mind where it had gone into hiding, and he couldn't cajole it back with all the distractions.

The younger Winchester's body contorted at an impossibly unnatural angle, and Dean narrowly avoided a reverse head butt. Losing patience, he pushed him down again none too gently. "Quit it, or I'll cold cock you into next week," he growled. The only response was a snarl and another circus-worthy contortion combined with an attempt to remove a chunk from Dean's left arm. This time, as Dean slapped him down, the body beneath his collapsed limply in what seemed like more than simple capitulation.

Dean instantly eased his hold, hope and terror slamming into his ribcage in equal but conflicting measures. "Sam?" There was no movement, not even the slightest rise of a light breath, and panic quickly floundered to the fore. That utter stillness was exposing the darkest, most primal of Dean's fears. Forgetting everything but the need to ensure his brother was still alive, to fix anything that was wrong, he tugged Sam around, turning his face up to meet his. He started when triumphant blue eyes suddenly opened wide to stare at him.

Jumping from concerned to pissed, bypassing concern for his own safety with a hunter's economy of emotion, Dean swore. He'd been played again. A monster had used Sam's knowledge of him to arrow unerringly for his Achilles heel. But he had no time to make his displeasure felt, as an irresistible force plucked him off the ground and hurled him aside. Despite his best efforts at preventing it, his hand was torn from his brother's, and the amulet that had been draped over their wrists spun skittering into a corner. There was time only for the briefest disorientation before a wall stopped Dean's progress. The shock of the collision was counterbalanced by the abrupt cessation of the pain through the link. He was given no opportunity to prepare himself, but was almost immediately yanked across to collide with the opposite wall, as if rebounding off a vertical trampoline.

His limbs flailed briefly in an effort to control his landing, but then he tried to relax into the inevitable, knowing that tensing in anticipation of pain would only lead to more severe injury. Having nothing in the room to act as a missile was irrelevant when he himself became the projectile. The room wasn't big enough for him to gain much momentum, and the ceiling was too low to afford NotSam the pleasure of bouncing him in that direction, but the bodysnatcher manipulated him like his own pinball marionette or like his personal yoyo. Dean was sure he recognised being subjected to 'walk the dog' and 'around the world'. Pain like white fire was screaming in his ribs, but he felt disconnected from it, too dazed to comprehend the brutality of the beating. It was 'shoot the moon' that finished it, and suddenly he was falling, floating away into the weightless and dark void that opened before him.

The first thing he was aware of was a headache so severe that his stomach heaved in silent protest. The nausea wasn't helped by the metallic slime filling his mouth that tasted oddly of defeat. He spat weakly, but that simple movement devolved into a hacking cough, and he tried to curl in on himself at the stabbing distress that created, but that just awakened a cacophony of other aches, so not moving seemed preferable to any choice of action.

However, his heart had beat to the rhythm of 'Save Sam, save Sam,' since he could remember, and the pounding of that mantra was particularly loud right now - and when had he ever done the smart thing anyhow?

He was lying face down on the packed earth so he experimentally cracked an eye and then tentatively lifted his head, taking several steady breaths to calm the nausea. It wasn't hard to find his brother - his still bound size 13s were a foot away from Dean's nose which wrinkled in response. As a bonus, there were three of him, though none stayed still long enough to verify that count. On the downside, they all had identical ice-blue eyes which glowered down at him in a kaleidoscopic whirl of fury. _So it was deja vu all over again_.

For a small, empty room, the pantry was remarkably mobile as it gyrated wildly in complicated figures around Dean's head as he slowly pushed himself into a sitting position, pride suppressing the majority of groans that threatened to escape. By the time the movement had subsided and the plurality of Sam's had coalesced into one, Dean was in a position mirroring that of his brother, feet to feet, knees up in a bracing position. The only difference was that his hands were free and, in a perverse display of one-upmanship, he wriggled his fingers at his possessed brother in illustration of that little detail. It was a gesture calculated to annoy - he might as well play to his strengths - and to goad the other man into making the first move while hoping that it wouldn't be to smack him around anymore.

The fact that he was alive was surprising and suggested that either NotSam still needed something from him or, rather more optimistically, that Sam still had some influence over his body jacker.

"What did you do?" There was anger evident in NotSam's voice, but also a break in the complacency that had characterised their interactions so far, and the hunter in Dean could sense fear in the same minute quantities that a shark could detect blood.

Any attempt at an insouciant reply, however, was lost to another bout of coughing, and after spitting out another mouthful of blood-tinged saliva, the most Dean could manage was to curl his lip in his best 'bite me' expression.

"What did you do?" the spirit repeated insistently, but this time there was a plaintiveness to his voice that was so quintessentially Sam that for a moment, in his dazed state, Dean almost explained. He swallowed thickly, trying to summon a smug smile, but merely managing to say dully, "I told you, you know nothing about me or my family."

There was silence as NotSam digested the implications of that, watching him consideringly. Dean didn't try to hurry the proceedings. He needed time to gather himself together. The words that previously lingered on the top of his tongue had drained to its root and he needed to coax them forward. He had to complete the ritual.

"Untie me!" NotSam demanded suddenly, turning slightly to gesture at his bound hands.

"What's the matter - your nose itching? I could help you out there." Dean demonstrated on his own face with evident satisfaction.

NotSam had clearly not developed a sense of humour in the last 150 years. "Untie me now or feel the full force of my wrath."

"Oh, come on, get some new material," Dean snorted, "That whole wrath thing is so 80's - 1980s that is. Besides, kill me, and have fun untying yourself, TK boy."

There was a sensation of being buffeted by high winds as if NotSam could barely restrain unleashing his full power, but Dean kept smiling serenely. For the first time, it appeared he had a bargaining point if nothing else. The hijacker evidently felt the shifting of control as well, because he struck back hard. "You're killing him, you know."

The words were softly spoken, but cruelly barbed and aimed at Dean's heart with deadly accuracy. His mind schizophrenically divided itself between a belligerent 'go to hell," and a more desperate, 'what do you mean?' but the jumbled mass of words proved an effective gag and he settled for a glare that would have melted steel at twenty paces.

NotSam sensed his advantage and pursued it relentlessly. "You may be able to..." he paused, seeming to fish for an unfamiliar concept, "...expel me, but it will not destroy me, merely return me to a more powerful state. However, your brother will not survive the process. Each individual cell would be blasted from within, and he would die in agony."

Dean tried to stop the horror he was feeling from showing in his face. He tried to tell himself that it couldn't be true. Demons lied, evil lied. But what if _was _true; what if his actions killed his brother? Fear turned to a lead weight in the pit of his stomach, and his gut spasmed in a hot wrench in response. But without the ritual, Sam was lost anyway. He had to make it work.

"It's what he'd want." His voice was a fragile husk. "You tell me you know his thoughts, then you know this is true. He'd rather die than let you use him to hurt others."

"But that's not what you want," the spirit stated slyly, feeling blindly with pitiless instinct for wounds it knew were there. "You promised to save him."

Heated misery-inspired fury stung his eyeballs, bleeding into his tear ducts and hemorrhaging out as white hot rage. If it hadn't been for the fact that Sam would ultimately pay the price and bear the scars, he'd have done his damnedest to pummel the smug expression off the face he could now see only through a red haze.

The spirit was treading with profane and cruel feet on what was private, if not sacred, between him and his brother, matters he never wanted exposed to the light of day, despite the festering pain they caused inside.

John Winchester's death had been devastating, ripping away half of his world in one inconceivable, guilt-inspiring moment. The impact of that loss had been exacerbated by the accompanying loss of faith in the man he'd followed so blindly since he could remember. John was no longer set firmly on the pedestal he'd occupied Dean's entire life. On the one hand, he'd offered the validation Dean had waited his entire life to hear and apologised for the burdens he'd always placed on his eldest son's young, willing shoulders; then, with his final words, he had increased that responsibility ten times more than anything Dean could have imagined, destroying any possibility of future peace of mind.

Whatever Dean had promised father and brother, he just wasn't capable of killing Sam. This might not have been the situation John Winchester had foreseen, but the circumstances now seemed eerily comparable. What if saving his brother had become synonymous with killing him? Just the mere thought caused pieces of his soul to splinter, their icy, jagged shards stabbing him mercilessly. Being torn apart by four wild horses would be less agonising than that choice. It would rend him apart mentally with the same final brutality.

But he had to believe it was not the time for that decision. He had started the ritual believing it would work, and he had to trust his own instincts. Meanwhile, bluff was all he had left. He bared his teeth in the nearest approximation to a smile he could dredge up. "Yes, you bastard. And I will save him, whatever the cost, even if it kills him, because you know I've promised him that, and I've never broken my word to him."

Saying it was like vomiting, the words sticking in his craw, and only bile lubricating their passage sufficiently to spit them out. His delivery, choked and low, was obviously convincing, because the entity's expression now held uncertainty and, with a thread of bitterness, Dean wondered how much of that emotion was his brother's.

He was never sure whether to be proud and flattered by Sam's utter faith in him or appalled that his brother knew him so little that he could truly believe that Dean could end his life under any circumstances.

Silence, and the staring match, resumed. Dean had no idea what the hijacker was thinking behind his Sammy mask, but he himself was too exhausted for thought, merely waiting for an opening he hoped would eventually come.

"I'll make you a deal," NotSam offered suddenly. "Untie me and I'll let you live. I'll allow you to leave unharmed."

Dean wasn't sure which absurdity to tackle first. He could point out that he'd rather die than leave his brother or that it was too late to describe him as unharmed, but he decided to go with the flaw in the logic that offered the best opportunity for insult.

"Do you expect me to just take your word on that? Let me guess - you'd swear on the lives of your children. Oh wait, I just remembered, you slaughtered them and drank their blood. I'll pass thanks. However, if you're in the mood for making deals, I've got one for you. Let my brother go, and we'll leave and never come back. You can haunt the premises for as long as you want."

Dean had never backed off a hunt, never compromised with the evil they sought to destroy, but this time he was willing. It was for Sammy, and there wasn't anything he wasn't willing to do for his brother.

Despite the sincerity of the proposal, the entity regarded him with the same skepticism Dean had just displayed. "Because your word is simply golden. Oh wait, Meg might just disagree with that."

The sarcasm, modeled on Dean's own, was just so Sam that he almost smiled in response. He couldn't decide if this was a positive development, showing that Sam had gained a stronger foothold, or whether it was potentially disastrous, an indication that NotSam had absorbed the essence of the younger Winchester.

He settled on ignoring the issue. "Touché. Well, I guess we've got ourselves a little Mexican standoff, so just make yourself comfortable." He stretched luxuriously and pointedly.

"Not if I get free," the entity retorted angrily, starting to struggle with his bonds.

"Oh, good. A dinner and a show!" Dean pretended to settle himself for the entertainment.

He was fairly confident his knots would hold. Telekinesis would only work if the psychic could see clearly which rope to pull. Yanking indiscriminately would merely tighten the bindings.

The cord around his brother's legs was an easier target, and Dean was unsurprised when one end whipped free. NotSam cast him a look of triumph to which he responded with unconcern and a moment's polite applause.

"Keep going," he said encouragingly.

This nonchalance was feigned, and as the other man twisted away in an attempt to see the knots behind him, Dean pounced. He dove at his brother, his shoulder hitting Sam's chest while reaching behind to grip his hand once more. They toppled over together. As fire once again shot up his spine, Dean channeled the scream that surged up with it into one syllable, "SAM!" It wasn't just a name or a call, it was a summons, insistent, demanding, desperate.

He poured into it his unflinching loyalty, all the fierce intensity of love he felt for his brother but could never express, every sacrifice freely offered, each time he'd stepped in front of danger for Sam and each time he failed to move fast enough, everything Sam knew about him and everything he didn't - his grief and pride when the kid left for college, his loneliness in his absence. His soul was laid bare in that one small word, raw honesty and need reverberating through the blood bond.

Dean could feel the air crushing in on him, as if the room had suddenly descended thousands of feet. His ears ached sharply from the pressure and a warm gush of blood streamed from his nose, trickling down his face and invading his mouth, accentuating the existing metallic taste. Suddenly Sam threw back his head, gasping a breath in the starving way of a drowning man breaking the surface.

"Dean?" The word barely qualified as a whisper, but the older brother was attuned to that almost soundless whimper through years of countless nightmares.

He was lying half across his brother, right arm wrapped awkwardly around Sam's back and he didn't think he could persuade that offending limb to surrender its grip any time soon. He swiped his left hand carelessly across his face, smearing the blood there like a bizarre design of war paint, before grasping his brother's shoulder and gently hauling Sam onto his knees. His hand curled around the juncture of Sam's neck and shoulder then slid around to support the younger man's head, giving him a chance to examine Sam intently. The bright hazel eyes that met his gaze were quite possibly the most beautiful things he had ever seen. The icy fist of fear melted from around his chest.

There was so much he wanted to say, but all those tender words dried out and stuck together in a desiccated mass in limbo between his heart and his vocal cords, and the only thing to trickle past that constriction was the flippant, if still fervent, comment, "You know, if anyone ever told you blue was your colour, they lied."

There was no answering smile. At this point, Dean would have settled for an eye roll or a purse of disapproving lips, because the blind, unfocused look on his brother's face refroze the worry that had just melted into a solid pit in his stomach. He pulled Sam closer, resting his forehead momentarily against his brother's, concern now yanking words effortlessly from him.

"Hey, Sammy, come on, little brother. I know you're in there now. This freaky  
>Kreskin thing you've got going is getting old." Cajoling, reassuring, encouraging - he'd say whatever was needed to reach his sibling.<p>

The light filtering through the window shaded Sam's face, casting hard angles and concealing shadows, but Dean didn't need to see his expression, the tightly wound line of his brother's back spoke eloquently of distress.

His thumb absently rubbed the nape of his brother's neck, trying to ease the tension that corded every muscle into taut immobility. "I've got you, kiddo. Come on, you've got this far, just a little further. Kick that frigging bastard in the incorporeal cahones and talk to me."

He was rewarded with another choking gasp and the flex of his brother's hand in his. Awareness flooded into those pained dark eyes. "Dean!" This time it was an acknowledgment rather than a lost plea, but the relief that began to surge up was brutally cut off at the knees.

"Finish it!"

Dean's throat closed up, lungs heaving with the futile effort to breathe, as the combination of triggering words and the brittle edges and commanding desperation of that voice flung him mercilessly into a flashback: another small dark room, another possession, consuming pain and blood loss, the potential loss of the family that comprised his whole world.

_You shoot me, you shoot me in the heart...we can end this here and now._

With miserable inevitability, that memory became inexorably entwined with another._ If I become something I'm not...promise?_

For a moment, that small, still place enclosing his brother and him had become the eye of a tornado. High force winds seemed to howl around them, bearing down, spiraling in, plucking at the periphery of his sanity. He would have recoiled away from his brother, but arm's length would only reach so far, and to separate would be to cast himself into that chaos.

Maybe Sam read something of his panic on his face, because he clarified his instruction. "Finish...the ritual."

Okay, not as bad as he originally thought, but effectively amounting to the same thing. "I can't," he objected fiercely. "He said it would kill you. I can't risk it. I'll find another way; there has to be another way. I'll fix it, I swear, just hang on."

"He lied...it's working...just finish it...Dean...please." The words died away, and a half-stifled groan replaced them, but the older brother could hear what the younger had failed to articulate - you promised.

Pain radiated off him in tangible waves, battering Dean with a force that overwhelmed him. He jerked his head with an abrupt nod, signaling acquiescence. There were no choices left, no last minute reprieves, no escape clause.

"I have to get the amulet." His voice was paper-thin with jagged misery as he gestured across the room. "Is it safe to let go?"

Sam took a deep, unsteady breath. "I've got it... just... hurry."

Coagulating blood had glued their hands together, and Dean's grip seemed to have frozen into position, but it was plain reluctance to lose the contact that made it almost impossible for him to release his hold. As he tried to stand, tightly wound muscles protested the time he'd been frozen on his knees, and he swayed perilously as he pushed upright.

His heart bumped and stumbled just like his feet as he moved to retrieve his necklace, the charm cool and heavy against his heated palm. His mind was numb, yet somehow reeling frantically. The only comfort he could find was that the ritual would tie him to his brother so completely that if Sam died, Dean would follow him almost immediately.

Reluctance dripped like rancid sweat from every movement as he returned and sank heavily back down in front of his brother. He tried to clear his throat, but found he could scarcely swallow. However, staring into Sam's dark eyes, he could see nothing but abiding trust. It was clear that the younger man believed that his big brother would save him - whatever the form that salvation took.

Dean needed to regain some of that faith himself. The ritual was powered in large part by the conviction of its practitioner. He had to get his head back in the game.

A thought occurred to him. If the strength of the bond between them could drag him to the other side on Sam's death, then surely the converse must be true too. If he dug in his heels and refused to budge, maybe he could keep Sam here. Stubborn he could do. With his brother's life at stake, he could be more obstinate and unrelenting than death itself.

He dragged up a shadow of his cocky smile, seeing a reflection of that confidence gleam in his brother's face. "Let's finish this bitch. Say goodbye to that creepy-ass bodysnatcher."

Pulling out everything he needed, he steadied himself, the significance of each item calming. "Let me untie you first," he offered, troubled by the possibility that the ligatures were contributing to his brother's discomfort.

Gray shadows haunted Sam's face, blue flecks swirling momentarily in his eyes as he shook his head stiffly . "Too risky...just do it."

Dean started the ritual again, his movements measured and precise, voice certain and resolute, doubt sidelined, then expelled, as the irrevocable truth and potency of the words built up into palpable pressure, forcing breath to near stillness and muting sound to a dull roar.

"Sanguis mei sanguinis. Frater mei animi. Socius in bello et pace."

He gently scrubbed Sam's sliced palm with his knuckles to open the congealing cut, then more carelessly scraped open his own hand with the knife again, needing the blood to flow generously.

At no time did he let his gaze drop from his brother's, allowing the intimacy of that connection to convey support, warmth, understanding, and the steadfast love that was never verbally expressed. The whole world had shrunk to this one room, coalescing around the man staring so trustingly at him.

With a final shared look, needing Sam's nod of approval, Dean once more reached round his brother and completed the circuit. As before, white shock raced along every nerve ending, sparking through his blood like fire, but this time Dean focused beneath the pain, clinging to his purpose. His own energy seemed to be draining from his body like blood from a slashed wrist, while conversely, the energy of the spell rippled through him with nowhere to go, until he didn't know if he would collapse like a deflated balloon or explode like an overinflated one.

Over-zealous gravity dragged at his limbs as he grimly tore a sheet from his father's journal. It was their Bible and such an action would normally be sacrilegious, but it was that very symbolism that was important now and, weighed against Sam's life, it was just paper. He placed it on the ground between them. "Iuncti fide." He grunted as the pressure mounted even higher, and a matching gout of blood slid from both their noses.

With his teeth, he tore open a sachet of salt, a few stray grains stinging a cut on his lip. He sprinkled it over the torn journal page. "Iuncti disciplina."

Sam's torso dipped forward, like a giant oak bowing before gale force winds, but no sound escaped his tightly closed lips, and his desperate eyes never left his brother's.

Dean's hand moved sluggishly to the knife that would finish the ritual, trying to draw air into lungs that refused to expand to accept it. He shakily extended the blade and wiped it in the gore decorating Sam's upper lip. He had more choices for sources of his own blood to join it. "Iuncti experimento," he continued hoarsely.

A trickling sensation from his ears testified to the force of air bearing down on them. He infused his final words with all the meaning and fervor he could muster, spitting them out as they threatened to wrap stickily around his tongue. "Iuncti potestate trium trium. Ligati. Addicti. Iuncti!" The blade smeared with their combined blood flashed through a weak shaft of light before plunging through the salt covered paper to stand quivering in the hard-packed dirt.

For a split second, the pressure amplified to an unbearable level, screaming in his ears, contracting awareness to a pinpoint, then all that pent-up energy exploded outwards, bowling Dean along like a leaf in a gale.

The floor was not any more forgiving than the walls had been earlier, and as he laboriously pulled himself to his knees, he gritted his teeth at the wave of pain and weakness that engulfed him. Blinking rapidly to dispel the haze that blurred his vision, he sought his brother. Sam hadn't moved, seemingly unaffected by the eruption of force as if it had emanated from his outer skin, leaving him untouched.

Panic spiraled and twisted in his gut like a snake as Dean noticed what looked like a sheen of blood covering his brother's face. He instinctively crawled closer, his left arm buckling as he tried to lever himself up, almost sending him nose first in the dirt. He reached up automatically towards his brother, but recoiled at the last minute, squinting to improve his still cloudy focus. That wasn't the colour of any human blood he'd ever seen, and he'd witnessed all too many gory scenes in his checkered career.

It looked like every pore of Sam's skin was extruding drops of black oil, a lustrous, viscous liquid that now concealed the younger man's every feature, including his squeezed-shut eyes.

Fear and hope again warred for dominance. This might not be the satisfying and dramatic spew of black smoke that signified the exit of a demon, but Dean would be willing to bet that whatever type of entity had possessed his brother, this was the physical manifestation of its departure. The ritual had worked, yet the entity's threat that such a move would kill Sam destroyed any pleasure in that triumph. Helpless terror curled around his heart. He wanted to do something, anything, but even touching his brother might interrupt the process, jeopardising Sam even further.

He knelt, hand still partly outstretched, his body frozen in unconscious imitation of his brother's wracked immobility. In the sudden silence, his ears rang with his own heartbeat and his throat closed so tightly he could scarcely breathe. Fretting over the possibility of Sam suffocating, he moved closer, hovering, ready to act, as soon as he knew what that action should be.

The drops swelled, pooling eagerly together like demonic quicksilver, then, as if a critical mass had been reached, the oily mixture started to pour off Sam's body, out sleeves and pants legs, leaving no trace of its taint behind. It lingered in one poisonous puddle before either evaporating into thin air or sinking invisibly into the ground - it was unclear in the paranormal vanishing act which had happened.

"Elvis has left the building," Dean whispered with satisfaction, but the warmth of relief which this departure afforded was abruptly subsumed by a chill of horror as, a second later, Sam collapsed with the finality of a head-shot corpse.

"Sam!"

SN SN SN SN SN SN SN SN SN SN SN SN SN SN SN SN SN SN SN SN SN SN SN

Iuncti fide – bound by belief  
>Iuncti disciplina – bound by training<br>Iuncti experiment – bound by knowledge gained by experience

Iuncti potestate trium trium. Ligati. Addicti. Iuncti! - Joined by the power of three of three. Bound (physically tied), Bound (by pledge), Bound (joined, connected)


	7. Chapter 7

Chapter 7

Dean was at his brother's side instantly, the gray tinge to what he could see of Sam's face hardly reassuring. But closer examination showed that he was breathing -harsh, panting breaths that stabbed rather than refreshed the lungs - but Dean would take it over the alternative. Sam's pulse was similarly stressed, pounding like a tap dancer on crack, with erratic skips and jumps, yet as Dean's fingers wrapped around his brother's wrist, he could sense the unique energy of his brother's life, the physical contact accentuating the bond the ritual had affirmed.

It was redolent of stubbornness and intellect, curiosity and passion. It was the riff of Dean's favourite guitar solo but in brass. Yet, in that surge of 'Samness', there was something wrong - a discord, a sour note in the rippling melody. Abruptly sickened by his own role in Sam's restrained and helpless state, the older Winchester pulled out his knife and carefully sawed through the bindings that constrained his brother's movements, wincing as he noticed that Sam's wrists had been rubbed raw.

"Come on kiddo, open those baby...uh...browns," he cajoled, rubbing the younger man's hands in an attempt to assist the return of blood flow.

He was rewarded with a brow twitch and a quivering of eyelids before confused hazel eyes stared up at him. But the dazed look suddenly gave way to a pain so raw that fear sliced like a hot knife in Dean's chest.

"Sammy? What is it? What's wrong?" He was starting to pat down his brother's torso frantically, searching for an injury he had missed, when every muscle beneath his hands snapped rigid, and Sam's spine arched in an agonised bow as if paddles were jump-starting his heart.

Dean could only watch in stunned horror, panic rising within him. His enforced medical knowledge had taught him that violent movements during a seizure should not be restrained. Since there was nothing dangerous within the vicinity, he should leave his brother to come out of it in his own time. However, that went against every protective grain in his body, especially since the entity's warning was screaming in his head - 'Each individual cell will be blasted from within and he'll die in agony.'

As the initial violent paroxysm subsided to be replaced by a smaller series of spasms that seemed to tear at every muscle group, Dean grabbed him by the shoulders and pulled him into the tightest hug he could manage. It was an embrace so fiercely protective Death itself would not dare try to penetrate it. He would physically anchor his brother's soul in his body and never allow it to escape.

In that position, he could feel the cramps and intense tremors that writhed through Sam's body, the convulsions shaking his own frame while the pain ghosted along that newly formed connection, echoing uncomfortably in his own synapses. Dean merely clamped down tighter, hoping that the agony that twisted his brother, streaking through his nervous system like lightening, would jump to him, always a willing lightning rod for his younger brother's pain.

Sam's skin seemed to have acquired a blue tint, and his heart was pounding against Dean's ribs as his chest heaved. Whether in sympathy or as another side effect of the recent ritual, the older man was also struggling with his breathing, as if he could no longer remember how to suck oxygen into his starving tissues, his throat throttling his trachea while his ribs clamped down cruelly on his lungs.

Hoping that this was another physical effect that was a two-way street, Dean concentrated on drawing long greedy breaths, ignoring the violent tremors that still shook them both. He felt every shuddering breath Sam took through the hand pressed against his brother's back and the short puffs that warmed his exposed collarbone in uneven bursts.

He steadied his inhalations still further as both of them seemed to feel the benefit. It reminded him irresistibly of Sam's coaching on the demon-infested airplane the previous year. That fear seemed so utterly mundane now; true terror was the responsibility of saving his brother with the consequences of failure too terrible to be contemplated. Horror was holding his brother in his arms, unsure if his actions had saved him or killed him.

He'd rather wingwalk or parachute or do acrobatics in the flimsiest of aircraft than face the possibility of losing Sam. His heart clenched with unendurable pain, the thought of life without his brother slicing through him with the precision of a scalpel.

However, although Sam's muscles were still jumping and trembling under his hands, his breathing was returning to normal, the fury of the spasms abating, releasing him from their relentless grip, his body relaxing by infinitesimal increments. He also seemed to have rediscovered at least some minimal voluntary motor function as a sudden new wave of pain surprised a grunt from him and his fingers curled weakly around the fabric of Dean's shirt to hold on. The older Winchester was happy to be his brother's life preserver, keeping him afloat until he was sufficiently recovered to assert his independence.

Dean couldn't contain the trembling of his own depleted body. The bitter taste of bile and despair had now commuted to the dull flavor of bone-deep exhaustion, and he seemed unable to move. He couldn't even summon the energy to mutter the reassurances that swam foggily through his mind. His brother's warmth was soaking into him, chasing away the chill and nightmare of loss. For an indeterminate length of time, he was lost in a gray haze, surprisingly comfortable despite the pain of his injuries, which were indistinguishable from that of his brother's distress.

It was only his hunter's instincts insistently nudging an internal alarm that prevented him from succumbing to the encroaching darkness. It wasn't over yet. The entity wasn't destroyed. The intense spasms that had coursed through Sam had now tapered to little aftershocks of jerks and twitches, and his heart beat, resonating through Dean's veins, was steady and strong.

As Dean straightened up, every bruise protesting, Sam let out a vowelless sound of disapproval and querying protest. "S'okay," the older Winchester offered comfortingly, patting his brother clumsily on the shoulder with oddly numb fingers. "Let me get you comfortable."

Gently, he scooted back a couple of feet to the wall, dragging Sam with him and propping him up against the bricks. He then scooted round in front of his brother, Sam's hand still entangled in his shirt preventing him from straying too far. Sam's eyes fastened on Dean as he entered his field of view; they were glassy, pupils blown as if concussed, but he was undeniably present, watching his big brother's every move intently as if afraid Dean would disappear if his perusal lapsed for even a second. Sam's bottom lip was caught between his teeth and, unsurprisingly, he'd bitten through it at some point, a trickle of blood decorating his chin.

Dean wiped off the smear with a calloused thumb, checking quickly for other injuries. "Relax, dude. You're going to be fine." He could feel an unspecified fear thrumming through the younger man, shaded with helplessness and frustration, but grounding him through the continuing ordeal was an overwhelming sense of trust. _Nothing bad's going to happen to you while I'm around._ This warmed Dean, but also made something inside his chest ache, small stabs of guilt that burrowed down inside, convinced that he had done little recently to merit that faith. But at least he now knew how to keep his brother safe.

Once he was sure his brother wouldn't keel over in a crumpled heap when he withdrew his support, he patted him again, reluctant to sever their connection. "Don't go anywhere, I'll be right back. We need some protection."

His progress to the door would have made a drunken sailor proud - a rolling stagger that lacked any element of grace, the force of necessity animating legs that felt disconnected from his control. Limp strands of overcooked spaghetti masquerading as limbs firmed up with some practice at walking, but he took advantage of the doorway for a brief respite, casting a look back to check on his brother's condition.

Sam was still staring intently at him, eerily silent, concern tinged with incipient panic in his gaze, and Dean wasn't sure if it was generated by his dismal attempt at walking or the prospect of his disappearance.

"Ten seconds," he reassured, holding fingers up in illustration. However, since one hand was still clinging to the door frame for stability, it lacked accuracy of clarification. He stared at his hand befuddled for a moment, but was unable to calculate the mathematical deficit, so settled for flapping it vaguely.

The kitchen looked different as he wobbled through the entrance, as if it had been years since he'd made his preparations there. Nothing had existed in the last few hours except the tiny bare room he'd just left and the fight for his brother's life, and now he was struggling to expand his awareness, but the sense of dissociation persisted. He couldn't even remember why he'd come back here, just that a foreboding had driven him onward. His head hung heavy, but simultaneously floated dizzily, flotsam on a wind-tossed sea.

His errant memory was jogged by the sight of the bowl, prominent yet incongruous on the bare counter. He picked it up and carried it with exaggerated caution back to his brother, small steps mitigating the possibility of a spill.

Sam had slipped further down the wall, a series of shudders aiding the downward force of gravity which he seemed unable to withstand, but his gaze was alert, and his relief at his big brother's return palpable.

Dean bent down to place the bowl beside the other man, sending the room spinning off kilter again, and he flopped down before he collapsed on top of his brother. Bracing himself, he grabbed two handfuls of Sam's shirt and propped him upright once more. "I swear, it's like you're a freaking newborn again. A gigantic mutant newborn...but still."

Sam's jaw was no longer locked by the spasms, and the older brother knew from experience that sibling provocation was the best way of goading him into speech. "Your head was just too big and it wobbled back and forth like one of those car thingies." He wagged his finger in illustration, happy to see the upward curve to his brother's mouth. He warmed up to his theme. "And as for the drool, you were like a St. Bernard - actually that hasn't changed much."

"Jerrrk." Sam's voice was scratchy and thickly slurred as if he'd just returned from a root canal, but it was the most beautiful sound Dean had ever heard.

"Bitch," he completed the ritual contentedly, knowing he was grinning like a fool, but utterly unconcerned.

The younger Winchester eyed his brother, a hint of mischief warming his gaze. "Sso, Dean, d-did you just m-marry me?"

"Wha..?" The unexpected question surprised a snort of laughter from his brother, and Dean's arms flailed in unconscious imitation of his mind as he struggled to find a sufficiently insulting rebuttal. "That's just...seriously, dude." He was too tired and too happy to see the twinkle in Sam's hazel eyes to put any concerted effort into the response.

"Dude, if I ever pop the question, it won't be to a freaky Cyclops like you."

Sam frowned. "Hey, I've got two eyes." He brushed a still shaky hand across his forehead.

"What?" it was Dean's turn to look confused. "I never said you didn't."

"Yeah, you did," Sam insisted. "Cyclops only have one eye - you know, in the middle of their forehead."

"Huh, that's weird. But they were really tall, right?"

"Well, yeah."

"There you are then. That's what I was going for." Dean settled back on his heels, the conversation clearly concluded to his satisfaction. For a moment, Sam couldn't remember the point of original argument, but mentally chased after it with typical stubbornness.

"Seriously, Dean, what the hell was that? I've read Dad's journal cover to cover, and that ritual's not in it."

Dean shrugged one shoulder dismissively and a little evasively. "It's just a little something I picked up in New Orleans."

Incredulity challenged the vagueness of that statement, Sam's voice strengthening with each utterance. "Dude, a little something you pick up in New Orleans is a t-shirt, a mardi gras snow globe, or, knowing you, an STD, not a...a..well, whatever that was."

"It's a binding spell," Dean offered vaguely. "Anyway, the important thing is, it kinda pushes out anything that shouldn't be there. But that's all it does. It depossesses, but it doesn't destroy them or send them to hell." Seeing Sam's confusion, he elaborated. "Like a blast of rock-salt, it'll drop kick 'em out of the action for a while, but your friendly neighbourhood confederate psycho will be back - Hey, easy there!"

Sam was struggling to rise, but his movements were spasmodic and uncontrolled, a travesty of his usual grace. His attempt to straighten up was rendered impossible by the paralysis that still gripped his legs. "I can't...not again." The words sputtered out almost incoherently.

"Easy tiger," Dean tried to soothe him, grasping his arms, but his brother shook off the attempt at consolation.

"You don't understand. It was just sheer evil...so much hate. It was like being buried alive, choking in the foulest slime. He wanted me to tear you apart, piece by piece, flay you, and enjoy doing it."

"Hey, enough!" Dean shook his brother slightly to command his attention. He should have realised he wasn't the only one living his worst nightmare. "He's not getting you again, do you hear me? I have here the patented, Dean Winchester, no-bastard's-sliding-inside-me-again, anti-possession fingerpainting kit." He wiggled his eyebrows in anticipation while stirring the concoction that had separated into a cold semi-congealed mass.

He paused for a moment, unsure where the sigil would be most effective, then with a shrug, pulled up his brother's t-shirt, warding off Sam's weakly protesting hands. "I think you were two last time I did this. Problem was, I didn't know the paint was oil-based or something and you were an awesomely smeary mess by the time I'd finished. Dad banned me from all artistic endeavors after that."

Once the design had dried on his brother's stomach, he decided to repeat it for good measure on his shirt. "There you go, possession-proof armour-plating."

"What is this crap?" Sam queried in disgust as the drying flakes tugged at the fine hairs on his belly.

"You don't want to know," Dean informed him unhelpfully. "But unlike my previous artistic efforts, it should wash off."

He wiped his fingers on his own shirt which was already torn and stained beyond redemption.

"So how do we finish him?" The question itself, even without the slight quaver that almost slid the words into a higher octave, betrayed the attempted nonchalance and revealed the dents in Sam's independent spirit as he reverted to a younger brother's reliance.

It kicked Dean's protectiveness into a higher gear, and he smirked confidently. "Salt and burn, no problem. His mojo might make him more powerful than the average spirit, but he's governed by the same laws and vulnerable to the same weapons. We just have to find the crunchy bits he left behind. Of course, since the signposts around here seem to be lacking..."

"Colonel Hayward Marston," Sam interrupted. "And his current address is the northeast corner of the cemetery."

Dean regarded his brother with a prejudiced eye. "Well, that's helpful. Nice of you to mention it."

The younger Winchester appeared to take the cheerful, fraternal sarcasm as a rebuke, his gaze dropping forlornly to where his hands were absently trying to massage feeling back into his legs.

"Dean, I...I tried to stop him, tried to keep him from...from rooting around inside me for information, but I just couldn't..."

"Whoa, hold it right there. Save the hair-pulling, hand-wringing, full-on guilt trip for a time I can slap you upside the head without feeling like I'm abusing an invalid."

It was absolution, Dean Winchester style, and despite his desire to push the conversation, Sam relaxed into that easy forgiveness.

"Besides," Dean continued, "The information you've gained is far more valuable than anything he learned. We were barking so far up the wrong tree, we'd never have figured out this dude's ID without your help." He shifted his weight, trying to find a more comfortable position without being obvious about it. "So, how're ya feeling?"

Sam tilted his head deprecatingly, "I'm fine, it's just like...pins and needles all over." His gaze skittered to the livid purple bruise covering his brother's cheekbone and his swollen, scabbed lip, merely the most visible of Dean's injuries.

"Pins and needles, huh?" It was an apt description, the sharp stabbing sensation of circulation rushing back along neglected pathways, yet their link showed Dean how it failed to adequately describe the intensity of the feeling, as erratic, unpredictable twitches still jolted through nerve endings. "I'd say more dartboard than pincushion, but either way, I don't think you can walk yet."

"It's like having two lumps of wood instead of legs." Sam thumped his fists on the deadened limbs in frustrated illustration.

"Well, I'm not dragging your heavy ass anywhere, so that doesn't leave us many options." Dean picked up the bowl and with torn lip caught gently between his teeth in concentration, he started pouring a thin stream in a circle around his brother.

"Dean, whachya doing?"

"Keeping Captain Caspar the Confederate Ghost out of your way while I turn him extra crispy.

Sam's spine snapped straight. "Damn it, you're not going by yourself. Just wait until I've got your back."

Dean didn't look up from his task. "I can't. Look, the ritual works like a shot-gun blast of salt. It takes time for the spirit to gather the energy to form again, but I've no idea how long we have, and we can't afford to waste another minute. It's far too strong in its incorporeal state, and neither of us is up for another go on the tilt-a-whirl."

"Dean, you can barely stand or walk in a straight line, and don't give me any of your 'I'm fine' crap. I can actually feel how far from fine you are. You're in no condition to dig a grave."

"I've done it in worse." It was said with characteristic bravado, but the open channel between them confirmed the truth of that throwaway statement, and a haunting wisp of desolation and loneliness accompanied the memory.

Nobody knew Dean better than Sam, but even for him, since Stanford, glimpses of emotional vulnerability were parceled out with the frequency of a parsimonious miser parting with his hard-earned gold, so this unintentional revelation, brief though it was, silenced Sam faster than any argument could. He watched as Dean finished the defensive line to his satisfaction, placing the nearly empty bowl beside Sam. Thinking his brother intended to depart, Sam reached out in sudden panic, snagging a sleeve. "Dean!"

His own eloquence deserted him. How could he find the words to explain that he was afraid that if Dean walked out of the room, he'd never see him again. They'd already been separated too long on this job, each meeting more violent and devastating as he'd grown increasingly incapable of mitigating the physical abuse sustained by his brother, the spirit leeching his energy, swallowing his life in greedy, long-denied gulps.

Dean picked up on Sam's misery, settling back into a more comfortable kneeling position. "I promise you're safe here." The comforting tone was reserved for children and brothers in distress, a gentleness that was innate but usually masked by his tough exterior. "There's no way he's getting to you again."

In a sudden burst of fraternal frustration that anyone could be so unconcerned about his own safety, Sam gave him a sudden shove, regretting it instantly as Dean overbalanced with a surprised, "oomph."

"I'm not worried about me, you stupid...jerk."

Dean sat sprawled on the floor, a slightly stunned expression on his face. Sam expected a sarcastic comment, a reference to his feminine tendencies, but his brother surprised him once more. "This is the only shot we get," he stated quietly. "It's not just our best chance, it's our only one. However, say the word, and we'll leave. I'll get you to the car and we'll book it, never looking back." There was no challenge in the words. It was a genuine offer, a promise of no future recriminations, his own get-out-of-jail-free card. Sam was tempted, yearning to grasp it with mouth-watering intensity, because he had tasted the foulness of evil, experienced the level of malevolence directed at his brother, and he knew that Dean wouldn't survive another encounter. Yet, if they left this hunt unfinished, it would fester in their minds, and Dean would always blame himself for the lives of future innocent families lost.

"You're not even armed." The rejection of the offer was implicit in the weak complaint, and he was rewarded with a quick flash of white teeth.

"I've got to get a shovel from the car. I'll pick up the other shotgun while I'm there. Wait a sec." He disappeared back into the kitchen, more steadily this time, and reappeared seconds later holding the gun he'd knocked out of NotSam's hand earlier. "This might not do you much good, but I'll feel happier knowing you have it. Now stay here, don't do anything stupid like move out of the circle, and I'll be back for you." There was another reassuring pat to his shoulder, then Dean was gone.

The sterility of Sam's surroundings offered little by way of distraction. The monotony of white-washed walls was broken only by lateritious smears that he'd like to think was the original color of the bricks breaking through, but he knew was actually evidence of the final vicious attack on his brother.

He didn't need the reminder of Dean, since his brother was a constant presence in his mind, a simultaneously unnerving and comforting sensation. It was new, yet utterly familiar. His first memory, baby-hazed and time-smudged, was of Dean wrapped round him, protecting him as he slept in the back of the Impala. He wished he could envelop himself in that innocence once more. He couldn't read Dean's thoughts or even definitive emotions, yet he found himself able to track his brother's painful progress, an insubstantial awareness of his movements that faded if he tried to follow it too closely. There was just grim determination and focused commitment that overrode weary pain.

Not for the first time, Sam marveled at his brother's ability to continue way past the endurance his body was supposed to possess. A sudden pulse of self-disgust throbbed inside. It was so damn easy to fall back into childhood patterns of behaviour, many of them so habitual, they gave them no thought at all. Dean had the bed nearest the door, Sam would escort the civilians to safety. Yet the younger Winchester had learnt to fight the most insidious of these tendencies - that Sammy shall remain protected while Dean shall take the risks, act as bait, attract the attention of the monster. He had to fight it, because Dean never would, accepting his role as an immutable law of nature such as gravity. But as Sam had grown out of the selfishness and obliviousness of youth, he'd sworn to protect his brother as Dean had always done for him. He was damned if he was going to stay here now, sheltered in his safe little circle while Dean battled an almost invincible monster on his own. He'd crawl to the graveyard if he had to.

He flexed the muscles in his legs, massaging them almost frantically in an effort to drive use back into them. His thighs were responding, although the daggers drove deeper and more savagely as feeling returned, but below the knees he was still numb. He could sense that Dean had reached the graveside, though how he could dig down to the coffin in his battered condition was a mystery. They were running out of time, of that Sam was sure. The inhabitation of his body by the entity had created an awareness between them, because he could feel it stirring, a fury and malevolence, a pilot flame that flared in preparation for an explosive blaze.

He needed a weapon, something to keep it away from his brother, and his gun was useless. Regular bullets wouldn't touch it. However... Sam's hands shook from residual weakness and eagerness as he extracted the clip from the automatic. His fingers felt swollen and clumsy, making the job of prying out the bullets almost impossible. He allowed each bullet to fall in his lap, then he scooped them all up and dropped them carefully into the dregs of Dean's potion. He rolled each around individually, meticulously coating them before setting them up to dry until they sat like a row of mini-torpedoes, blood-stained and gleaming in front of him. While they dulled to a dry sheen, he bounced his knees up and down, welcoming the prickly beginnings of sensation that told him control over the last area of his body was returning. He returned the loaded clip to his gun and set it down beside him. His hands were sticky with what he recognised as blood, and a curl of nausea twisted deep in his belly as he realised that there was only one possible source of that fluid.

There was no time to dwell on the thought. Marston was coming. Sam could feel his approach like the advent of hoar-frost, each cell crystalising from the inside out under the silent onslaught of verging terror. Every instinct screamed at him to run, adrenaline insisting it was his only hope of survival. Only training held him fast. His heart crawled into his throat, choking his breath stillborn. Dean had told him he was safe here, so he would trust to that almost invisible line soaked into the dirt, the line containing his brother's blood. His back pressed against the wall so hard it felt like each vertebrae left its own impression. The temperature dropped below freezing and what air he panted out plumed like a horizontal whale's spout.

An invisible enemy always carried twice the horror, the imagination filling in unknown proximity and intention with imminent and agonising possibilities. Sam clamped down on his fear, determined not to give the entity the satisfaction it yearned for.

"Hello, Sammy." Sam was unable to conceal his startled recoil, unsure if the words were whispered into his ear or directly into his mind.

"There's only one person who gets to call me that, and you're not even on the short list, you dead freak," he snarled back.

"But who knows you better than me, Sammy? Who's been privy to your every little secret? I've absorbed you. I've tasted your dreams, swallowed your ambitions and digested your every thought. You're part of me, and I'm part of you. Together we're invincible."

With the abruptness of an explosion, the spirit materialised outside the circle, and Sam recoiled impossibly further, drawing his knees up to his chest, confronted by his own face. Only the unearthly flickering and unnatural blue of the eyes belied his mirror image. Yet as Sam stared, he could see, as if concealed between the pixels of a photograph, the other half of the hybrid, the real face of the spirit.

"You don't know jack shit about me," he retorted, it only occurring to him afterward that he used Dean's words. "That face is stolen, every memory that you think you have is merely evidence of an act of violence. True knowledge of a person is a gift freely given, earned. Theft cannot give you any part of me. You've got nothing."

There was a distorting flicker, then Marston was pressed up against the circle, staring down at him hungrily. "You'll give yourself to me freely. By the time I've finished, you'll be begging me to take you."

Sam glared back at him mutinously. "Don't bet on it."

"You'd do it to save your brother, wouldn't you?" The entity's voice whispered confidingly. "How much more do you think that Dean can take? How long would you stay cowering there in safety if I had him in here with me? You could listen while I snap his ribs one at a time with the crisp crack of a wishbone. Then, when his chest is splayed open in front of me, I'll reach in and unravel his intestines."

"Stop!" Sam's voice cracked, torn open as if caught on a rusty nail, each word a punch to the heart. "You're right. I'll do it. Just...please... leave him alone." He buried his face in the arms that encircled his knees, needing to think and wanting to escape the knowing scrutiny. His acquiescence wasn't feigned. He would do it. He would do anything if it would save his brother. Yet he was under no illusion that such a sacrifice would actually safeguard Dean. Essentially, it meant that the hands that ripped him apart would belong to his younger brother. The older hunter would fight to the end to rescue him again.

Sam's thoughts pinwheeled furiously, sparks of half-formed plans flying off in all directions. He'd been going at this all wrong. Defiance wasn't the answer. Marston wanted the spice of his distress and betrayal, so Sam had to tantalise the bastard, offer him morsels of pain and guilt to keep him interested, keep him away from Dean. He had to buy time for his brother to finish the job.

He raised his head wearily. "Why me?" It was a genuine question, and had been an almost constant undercurrent in his mind in the last month.

"Because you're perfect. None of the others were strong enough. Their minds broke, splintered off before I could complete the process. You just kept fighting."

Sam was tempted to point out that if the entity had succeeded in killing Dean, his mind would have probably imploded messily, but since he didn't want to bring his brother back to Marston's attention, he settled for looking appropriately scared. "I don't really think that I..."

"Take off your shirt," Marston interrupted.

"Wha...oh." Sam squinted down at the symbol on the cotton. "Yeah, okay."

He removed the garment slowly, the faked reluctance actually concealing the utmost care not to allow his t-shirt to ride up and reveal the second sigil on his skin, all the while giving thanks to overprotective brothers and multiple layers of clothing.

He resisted the temptation to test the efficacy of the mark by throwing the shirt at Marston, merely balling the material and dropping it beside him. He tried to postpone the inevitable discovery. "I can't even walk at the moment; my legs are useless, paralysed."

"Is that why he left you here?" The spirit peered at the limbs in question curiously, hot greed still apparent in unearthly blue eyes. "But where is big brother?"

"He went to the car for first-aid supplies," Sam improvised glibly. "Just let me tell him, explain. Once he's gone, I'll step over the line."

He knew instantly he'd overplayed his hand. Marston had learned too much from Sam's memories and Dean's own actions to believe that such abandonment was possible.

"You're lying, Sammy." Marston disappeared. There was no melodramatic bang of a vacuum created, yet it felt as if the air had been sucked out of the room.

"Marston...Marston?" Sam fumbled to his knees, but before that split second of indecision could resolve into a course of action, the spirit was back, furious face crushed against the invisible barrier only inches away from Sam's own.

"I'm going to kill him." The violence with which the words were hissed should have been accompanied by the spit of saliva or noisome breath, but the only physical sensation was the impact of their meaning on Sam's heart. "I'm going to shred him to mincemeat, and, once you're an only child, I'm coming back for you."

"No...NO! I'm right here. Take..." But by the time Sam had lurched the short distance out of the circle, Marston had vanished again.

"Oh God, Dean!" 


	8. Chapter 8

Chapter 8

Sam paused only long enough to snatch up the gun, then he was out of the room and pounding down the corridor that led outside. As his treacherous legs repeatedly buckled, he careened off the walls, stumbling to a knee, but then he was up and smashing through the back door. It was dawn, or maybe dusk, time had totally lost its meaning, but the crepuscular light cast long shadows. Illumination was irrelevant, however. He wasn't navigating a known path to his brother, but following a crow-flies line, pulled as an iron filing to a magnet by the ritual-created link to Dean.

Through a mostly abandoned garden, hurtling abandoned flowerbeds, weeds brushing the soles of his shoes. Faster. He was screaming an alarm mentally, but not aloud, no oxygen to spare from powering recalcitrant limbs. A ditch loomed before him, and he tried to take it in a flying leap, but he stumbled on the opposite bank, scrambling onward. Faster, faster. He plunged ahead, up a small hill, the ground sloping cruelly upward, his heart thumping as though it would burst, but long legs hit their stride, eating up distance, scaling rocks as if they were steps. Still faster. The wide open space now bordered a quarry, and he was forced to swerve off his path, skirting the edge of the sharp cliff before diving into the woods beyond.

Closer now. He caught his ankle on a root, but it didn't change his headlong rush. Only a few gleams now lit the tree trunks, but he was already blind in his terror, stumbling and tripping over unseen obstacles, striking his face on low-hanging branches. He was torn and bleeding, twigs scratching at his face like a striga's claws, but his feet kept pounding. He swerved past another tree, chest heaving, lungs straining. Then the harsh blast of a shotgun discharge palpitated through the air, and Sam skidded to a halt, freezing into immobility as the sound echoed over the topmost branches like a bitter wind and the birds roosting on top took flight. His knees folded, refusing to obey his commands as he threw all his energy into listening, hoping for some sign that Dean was still fighting, but a languorous silence settled over the scene and, even internally, he'd lost the sense of his brother. Where before he could touch Dean's obstinacy, taste his determination, feel the rasp of weary determination contrasted with the pure smoothness of selfless protectiveness, there was now nothing - just the stillness of blank, silent space.

Dean couldn't be dead; he just couldn't. Even before this connection had been created, Sam had always believed he'd know if anything happened to his brother, a belief that had comforted him during many sleepless nights at Stanford. Dean was his foundation. He had built himself on the sure steadfastness of his brother's presence, established his sense of self on the firmness of Dean's unswerving care. During a peripatetic and uncertain childhood, Dean had been his home, his security, and it was that certainty of forgiveness that had allowed him to leave for college. But if a foundation is removed, even the strongest house will crumble.

Powerful muscles bunched in an agony of denial then exploded into renewed motion, now brushing aside branches like matchwood. A kernel of hope nurtured by faith in his brother's survival abilities forced his waning sanity back in his brother's direction. Tree trunks gave way abruptly to the stunted curves of tombstones. The dim light reflected eerily off the stone, but to Sam it was as commonplace a sight as cubicles and desks were to the average man.

It was a small cemetery, only family members buried there since the plantation was established in 1762. Sam swerved unthinkingly past all obstacles, aiming for the far right corner. He already knew what he was going to see - the picture as clear as if presented in a vision, so why did the sight of the body crumpled by a half-dug grave freeze him into immobility?

Goddamit, he hated it when his brother looked small. Dean Winchester was larger than life, and only brotherly one-upmanship plus the view of the older man's hairline told Sam that his brother was the shortest in the family. Dean's sheer presence dominated any room he was in, and his brash confidence attracted all eyes, so small wasn't a word Sam would ever have considered using to describe his brother until he had seen him in a hospital bed under a de facto death sentence by electrocution. It was too dark to identify the colour of the stain that covered Dean's face, but Sam could recognise the sweet copper-penny smell of blood from yards away.

Sam must have transported himself or levitated to his brother's side, for he certainly never remembered moving there. He was only aware of the soft, grainy dirt cushioning his knees as he fell gracelessly beside the body.

"Dean, please." They were the same words he'd used as a three-year-old to beg for more ice cream, as a four-year-old for another book at bedtime, and as a five-year-old for the last bowl of Lucky Charms. He had understood their potency, their magic at an early age. Dean had rarely denied him anything he truly wanted, not so much as indulgence, but because the older boy wanted to grant him the only thing in his power - a happy childhood. Now Sam just wanted one more thing, and he'd never ask his brother for anything again.

He reached out a tentative hand to shake Dean's shoulder gently. The groan that met his ears at this maneuver was the sweetest sound he had ever heard, and he shook again in hopes of a repetition. The tickle of his brother in the back of his mind burst out as if he'd bitten into a Dean-flavoured chili pepper, and the older hunter stirred weakly under his hands.

As Dean's eyes finally opened, Sam was seized with the strong desire to pull his brother into a hug and an equally strong urge to slap him upside the head. Maybe Dean read both of these conflicting impulses, or maybe he didn't have a single square inch of skin that didn't hurt, for his first words were, "Don't touch me!" However, he didn't complain beyond the occasional grimace as Sam assisted him into a seated position, the side of a tombstone propping him up.

"You're bleeding." Dean squinted at him in bleary concern.

"It's just scratches."

The older hunter lifted a hand to verify that diagnosis. "Dude, it looks like a kitten mistook your ugly mug for a ball of yarn."

Sam brushed at his face unthinkingly, surprised by the sting of broken skin. "Yeah? Well you look like the slowest runner in a horror movie."

"Nice, thanks." Dean leaned his head back and closed his eyes for a minute. Sam hovered, wanting to touch, wanting to help, but knowing his brother was too vulnerable to allow it. Suddenly Dean's eyes popped open again. "So what the hell part of 'stay put' don't you get?"

Sam had expected that diversionary tactic and retorted quietly. "The part where I have to save your ass."

"My ass is just fine." Dean gestured vaguely around at the absence of spirits. "I think I got him at the same time he got me."

Sam nodded, remembering hearing the shotgun blast. "But, he'll be back."

"Yeah, he's the gift that just keeps giving. Well, it's too dangerous for you to be here." Dean shifted as if he intended to get to his feet, but subsided with a grimace.

"Bullshit, it's you he wants to kill," Sam stated bluntly.

"And how is that different from any other day of the week? Sam, things want to kill us all the time. This bastard wants to _commandeer_ you, and he'll use me to do it."

"And how is that different from any other day of the week?" The brutal words were gently uttered, and Sam got no satisfaction from seeing Dean flinch, but he took advantage of the temporary silence to issue some orders of his own. "You sit here and shoot Marston when he shows up again, and I'll dig up his bones."

He handed Dean the shotgun and, picking up the shovel, he jumped into the half-excavated grave. He was surprised Dean had achieved as much as he had, considering his injuries and the hard-packed state of the soil. Quickly, he fell into a long-practiced rhythm, minimum effort for maximum result - thrust, scoop and swing, an exhausting pace, but one he could maintain.

The gibbous moon was rising on the mostly concealed horizon when he felt the cold, creeping sensation that warned of Marston's approach. "He's coming!"

"Okay, I got it." A quick glance showed him his brother on his feet, watchful and alert, shotgun held half-raised in both hands. Sam redoubled his efforts, though he estimated it would be another foot before he reached the coffin.

A chill wind howled into the clearing, whipping around their heads and sending streams of debris in their faces. Sam hunkered down, trusting his brother to watch his back. He heard a slight thunk as the tip of the shovel struck the top of the casket, but it was too late. The winds were circling as if corralling them closer to the grave. Numbing cold stole feeling from his ears and whipped a further warning from his lips.

He could sense the imminent release of power and knew exactly where it would be directed. He was scrambling out of the grave in a desperate attempt at a diversion when, like a psychic punch, the energy whiplashed towards Dean, catapulting him through the air. If his trajectory had ended with a tombstone, it would probably have killed him, but, for once, there were no solid objects to arrest his fall, and he landed with a lithe roll, coming up on one knee with his gun raised. "Where is he? I can't see him," he cried urgently.

The storm had stilled abruptly, and the silence was as ominous as the former howling had been. Sam scanned the area frantically, before realising that Marston had chosen not to materialise. How the hell were they supposed to fight an invisible enemy? He closed his eyes and felt himself at the apex of an unbalanced triangle. The warm, supportive strength of the bond he shared with his brother stretched in one direction and a nebulous tug, more like something had been ripped away from him, turned him in another. He pointed, "There!"

The blast of a shotgun echoed his shout, but the entity had already moved. "No, there!" But the angle between them was too great to allow for any accuracy. Dean had no way of knowing how far along the indicated line of sight Marston was standing.

Dean ejected the shells and started reloading, but an irresistible force slammed him back against a gravestone and held him there immobilised. Marston materialised in front of him. He now looked the picture of a Civil War soldier, complete with long sideburns and drooping mustache. He stared at Sam with pleased anticipation. "One rib at a time," he reiterated. The words were echoed by a pained grunt from Dean.

"No, don't!" Sam was out of options. He couldn't fire at Marston because, while the bullet would hopefully dissipate the spirit, his position directly between the brothers would mean the bullet would then drive straight into Dean.

Sam spread out his hands at both sides, looking as harmless as six foot five can. "What do you want? Do you want me to beg? I'll do it. It's me you want. Just take me, there's nothing to stop you."

"Sam, no!' Sam wasn't sure if Dean's dismayed cry meant he'd forgotten the sigil, or if he was simply adding verisimilitude to the deal. The younger Winchester was banking on the fact that Marston's feverish greed to possess him would override his sadism. He licked his lips, which remained dry as ashes, trying to figure out how to look more enticing.

There was a moment's indecision, then Marston flickered towards him like a defective film on fast forward. Sam held his ground, arms still outstretched. He was peripherally aware of Dean scrambling for his shotgun, then the entity was on him. There was a brief, searing sensation centered on the sigil painted on his belly, followed by Marston screaming, an unearthly, frustrated howl - Golum deprived of his ring. His prey was in his reach, yet incomprehensibly was still untouchable. Sam whipped his gun from the small of his back and shot the hovering spectre right between the eyes. It appeared to shatter into a million sparks, each blood-red, which fizzled out like dying fireworks.

Sam's shoulders slumped in relief, his heart slowing from a racing gallop to a more acceptable trot. Dean, gun hanging limply by his side, was looking at him in astonishment. "What the hell did you just do?"

Sam tucked the gun back in his pants. "I coated the bullets with that concoction you left," he confessed.

"Not bad, little brother," Dean nodded approvingly.

Praise from his brother still had the power to warm him, and Sam ducked his head to hide the pride he felt. "There are only trace amounts on each bullet, so we probably don't have long before he's back. We need to hurry."

They both resumed their previous positions, though Dean's decision to hitch his rear on a convenient tombstone betrayed his deteriorating condition. The casket was heavy cast-iron, a peculiarity of the period, so it couldn't be smashed through, but had to be carefully excavated, and the hasps undone. Opening it was a bitch, since it was too far down to release the catches from ground level, even with Sam's longs arms, and it required contortionist maneuvers to open from inside the grave itself. But, finally, they were looking down on Marston's corpse. It was remarkably well preserved, either the ritual or the coffin mummifying him so that his features were easily identifiable as the entity that had so ruthlessly pursued them.

Dean hadn't moved, but was still leaning, hunched over, both his posture and stillness testimony to his injuries, but there was no time for first-aid now.

"Salt?" Sam asked tersely.

"Bag," came the equally laconic response, Dean swinging the shotgun in a minimal arc to indicate the location.

This time, there were no preliminaries. Sam had only taken one step towards the bag when, with the shock of ice sliding through his veins, he became aware of Marston's presence. He dove desperately for the salt, but as he neared arm's reach, the bag sprang towards him, telekinetically impelled by the entity, and one of the multitude of hard objects contained within impacted forcefully with his face. His head snapped back, and he landed in a confusion of tangled limbs, dazed to the threshold of unconsciousness.

He heard the shotgun discharge once, then again, but it was muffled and strangely distant as if his ears were stuffed with cotton wool. He was completely disoriented. He flashed back briefly to the time when he was eight and had had his appendix removed. He had woken up from the anesthesia convinced he was lying on his stomach. Trying to push the oxygen mask of his face, his confusion had been complete until his brother, sneaking into the recovery room against orders, had called his name.

Now, as then, Dean's cry of 'Sam' reoriented him, a compass needle seeking north. To his surprise, he was lying on his back, though feeling like a stranded turtle as he attempted to flop onto his belly as a prelude to gaining his feet. Blood from a cut above his left eye obscured his vision, and he scrubbed frantically to clear it, succeeding just in time to see his discarded shovel rise off the ground, sleek, gleaming and quivering with eagerness before slicing through the air with lethal velocity towards his brother. Sam screamed a wordless cry of denial or warning, unable to affect or influence the course of the implement. Somehow, Dean slipped aside at the last moment, the sharpened blade clanging viciously against the tombstone, sending sparks and chips ricocheting.

For the first time, Sam noticed his brother had lost the shotgun somewhere in the proceedings. Dean's hands were empty, and he swayed like a willow in a storm, and a sudden sense of his brother's vulnerability hit Sam like a pile driver to the gut. It would take him approximately 30 seconds to salt, douse and flambé the corpse, but Dean didn't have that long. He wasn't alone in that knowledge. He could sense hopelessness intertwined with Dean's customary defiance and a sense of finality in his determination that said the older Winchester intended his death to buy Sam enough time to finish the job and save himself. He'd always known the lengths that Dean was willing to go to protect him, his willingness to sacrifice himself, but it was absolutely unacceptable, and it was now time to deflect Marston's attention back to himself.

"Marston, you sniveling rat-bastard, where are you? Show yourself you cowardly worm." He flailed around for some insult potent enough to sting the spirit into abandoning his best advantage. "Are all Confederates like you, cowering behind the bodies of children?"

He saw Dean take a step towards him, but that forward momentum was abruptly reversed. His legs shot out from underneath him, his arms windmilling wildly, and the air was forced from his lungs in an agonised grunt as he slammed against the tombstone that had just protected him. His feet scrabbled for purchase in the ground below in a way that defied gravity, indicating psychic restraint. His back was bent at an unnatural and clearly painful angle over the top of the granite.

"Dean!" It seemed to be the only word left in Sam's vocabulary, encapsulating his world. Stumbling forward, he struggled to focus as waves of his brother's pain crashed to shore in each nerve ending, the phantom pain of ligaments stretched to snapping point and bruised and cracked ribs forced cruelly against unyielding stone, the frantic pounding of an overstrained heart. The sparkling haze that blurred his vision could have been Dean's or maybe it was a mutual condition. It was becoming harder to tell. It took him a minute to realize that Marston had materialised again, this time using Dean as a shield.

A translucent arm was wrapped around his big brother's throat, and the analytic part of Sam's mind wondered why. Was it a pointless bleedover from the entity's human past or did it somehow reinforce his psychic hold? Aiming his gun at Marston meant pointing it at his brother, and Sam couldn't bring himself to do that, so he held it firmly in both hands, muzzle directed harmlessly in the air. He edged sideways, trying to get a shot without endangering Dean, but the spirit turned with him, still warding off any possibility of shooting.

"It's the end of the line, Sammy-boy." The southern accent was thick, cloying to each word as a sticky threat.

"Yeah, end of the line for you," Sammy retorted, trying to project calm conviction. "You kill him, and you've lost every hold over me. You'll be nothing but a greasy memory seconds later."

"Shoot the fucker." Dean's rasping voice cut into the confrontation, oddly vibrant and insistent through the half-strangulation.

With no way to inform his brother he couldn't take the shot without also tipping off Marston, Sam elected to ignore the interruption. "This is a no-win situation for all of us, but we can make a deal."

"I don't think so. We've had this conversation before. How long do you think it will take before you drop the gun when I do this." There was no overt sign of violence, but suddenly Dean choked out a wet exhale of breath that was eerily reminiscent of the time he'd been pinned to a wall in a dark room, blood rippling down his shirt as he was torn apart from the inside out.

The sound slammed into Sam like a punch, rage exploding in a shrapnel flash in his brain, annihilating everything in its path. "Let him go!"

"Drop your gun!"

"Let him go!" The roar of adrenaline-fueled fury was as deafening as the confusion of simultaneous shouting. Time slowed, the elasticity of sheer terror stretched into slow motion, sight tunneling to Dean's struggling form. Somehow, in the confusion, he could see his brother's lips move and, though no sound reached him, he could hear the words, each one a silent drop in the ocean of tumult, yet they carried the impact of a small nuclear explosion once their import pierced the wall of bleak incomprehension.

"Shoot me."

This was all wrong. Dean was supposed to be the voice of reason here, the cohesive force in their intense, centrifugal family. Shock whiplashed through Sam's spine, intertwined with burgeoning anger - stupid, suicidally self-sacrificing bastard.

The shouting echoed unpredictably off the slabs of stone before slipping over the trees to be lost in the night, but the clamour still didn't drown out the quiet insistence of Dean's repeated command, "Shoot," and this time the meaning seemed to pour out of him and seep into Sam's mind. Dean wanted him to shoot Marston through his brother's body. Sam's rejection of the plan was visceral and instinctive. This was no salt gun, peppering the skin with a stinging bite. He had grown up around guns and had more than just theoretical knowledge of the damage they could inflict on human flesh. Dean's plan was feasible. The bullet would punch through skin, explode through muscle and bone with brutal efficiency and probably obliterate the entity behind his brother, but at what cost?

Sam's heart was kicking like a go-go dancer, and he felt dizzy as if the air were getting thin. He had shot his demon-possessed father without hesitation or compunction, driven by anger, revenge and, above all, the relief at finally taking action. He would have done anything at that moment to prevent the yellow-eyed demon from torturing and killing his brother. In many ways, the circumstances were little different now. He had to take the shot to protect Dean - he knew that academically - yet there was no tidy limb shot available; the tombstone concealed Dean's legs and his torso was a much dicier target. Vital organs packed the area, making the likelihood of killing Dean just as possible as that of saving him.

With each pulse of blood through his veins, Sam could imagine a different horrific scenario, his brother dying at his hands. He had to starve his imagination, his actions had to be mechanical. He was trained; his hands needed to move automatically, confidently, as clinical in their rhythm as Dean's when he stripped and cleaned a gun. He tried to calm the irregular stutter of his breath, then Dean made a little noise in the back of his throat that should have been a scream, but strangled half-formed, and the gunshot split the air. Something exploded in a fountain of odd colour. For a moment that lasted a lifetime, Sam thought it was all his brother's blood, but it dissipated and vanished. The flash temporarily blinded his dark-accustomed eyes, and when he blinked away the flare-inspired tears and the smear of confused after images, nobody was there. Panic slammed into his brain like a punch with the fear that Marston, in some inexplicable spirit fashion, had taken Dean with him into the temporary, ghostly nonexistence.

"Dean!" the scream was involuntarily wrenched from his throat.

The cataract of adrenaline subsided not one iota as he spotted a foot sticking out from behind the gravestone, and he realised that Dean had collapsed on the ground, hidden behind the slab of rock.

"Dean," he cried again, his vocabulary still reduced to just his brother's name, as if it were the only thing that mattered. He rounded the tombstone in an agony of anticipation, skidding to a halt at the sight that met his eyes - Dean struggling to push himself into a sitting position with one hand, the other tightly clasped around his side. He met his kid brother's gaze, a smirk twisting his lips. "Nice shooting, Tex," he quoted, his voice raspy and perilously breathless.

Sam's eyes followed the curve of his arm instinctively to where Dean's hand was clamped tightly. Even in the dark, there was no mistaking the viscous liquid that seeped between his fingers, dripping rapidly on his thigh. "Oh God, how bad is it? Let me see."

He reached out, but recoiled guiltily as Dean swatted as his hand impatiently. "Dude, get off me. What are you thinking? First things first."

Sam blinked at him stupidly, unable to think about anything that took priority over his brother right now. His blank incomprehension obviously showed on his face, since Dean's expression softened. "Salt and burn, kiddo," he said gently. "I'm so not up to another round with Sparky right now."

"Marston." Sam had truly not given any thought to the impermanence of the ghost's disappearance, relief that Dean was alive running through his body like morphine after a serious injury, slowing his thought processes and numbing his reactions. He stumbled back to the open gravesite, snatching up the salt and sprinkling it with uncoordinated movements. The lighter fluid received even shorter shrift. He poured in a generous helping, and he'd already turned back to his brother when the match ignited it with a loud whoomp that would undoubtedly have removed his eyebrows and left him bald if he hadn't been moving away.

Dean was now seated, leaning nonchalantly against a tombstone, but the fact that he wasn't already on his feet spoke volumes to Sam.

"Okay, let me see," he demanded tersely, brandishing the bandages he'd snagged from their bag in passing.

Dean's hand reluctantly fell away, through acquiescence or exhaustion Sam wasn't sure, but he was able to see the damage he'd wrought. He should have been gratified to see that he'd hit exactly where he'd intended, just above the hip, but below the ribs, hopefully missing the intestines.

The older Winchester seemed to read the thought, if not the mood behind it. "I couldn't have done it better myself; it was a damn good shot."

"Don't," Sam cut him off, "Just...don't." He couldn't bear to be praised for this, congratulated as if it had been a bulls eye on some paper target. The taint of self-loathing must have showed, because suddenly blood-stained fingers were fumbling for his own. Dean's grip was not as firm as usual, but still eloquent in its rebuke.

"Sammy, you just saved my life, so unless you want me to get the wrong idea, you don't get to mope about that." There was aslight shake, the slip-stick of coagulating blood.

Sam attempted to extricate himself without hurting his brother, but Dean merely tightened his clasp. It always amazed Sam that the self-professed chick-flick-hating hunter was so willing to initiate an emotional moment if he believed his kid brother needed it. Moreover, he was surprisingly good at listening and saying just the right thing. Sam did feel a little better, the thick block in his throat whittled down to a small pebble.

His intellect had already acknowledged the truth of the situation, but it would take longer to convince his heart that it hadn't been an act of betrayal, that if he had been faster, smarter, better he couldn't have found another way that didn't involve his brother oozing blood under his fingertips. However, now he just needed to convince Dean that he was fine so he could patch him up.

"Yeah, I got the memo. Shooting family members is occasionally necessary. It's no big deal."

"You can't bullshit me right now, Sam. Not only can I watch you angsting and emo-ing, now I can actually feel it." He coughed and shoved his brother's hand aside weakly. "It's draining my testosterone, and I think I might hurl."

"You're the one fainting like a little girl," Sam grumbled, but it was an automatic response as he concentrated on a professional wrapping of bandages. Dean gave a terrible half-groan, half-gasp, and Sam had to fight the instinct to pull away, hating the fact that he was causing his brother more pain.

"You're the girl." Dean batted ineffectively at his brother's hands, but allowed his head to loll back when Sam ignored him. Dean was starting to list badly despite the support of the stone behind him and, worse, Sam could feel him slipping away in his mind, as if someone had pressed zoom-out on a camera and turned down the volume simultaneously. He wasn't sure if this was an indication of approaching unconsciousness or something more threatening that he didn't even want to label, but that sensation of his brother falling away, losing ground, was terrifying.

"Don't you wuss out on me. Wake up!" He reached out and shook Dean's shoulder roughly. He had forgotten the bruising caused by the falling statue and was surprised by the violence of his brother's reaction, thinking at first that the abrupt recoil was a result of some type of flashback of the possession. However, recognition shone from the older hunter's eyes despite the disorientation, and he tried to sit up against Sam's restraining hands.

"Marston! Is he gone? Did you finish him?" For a moment, Sam was tempted to lie. He knew that Dean never quit on a hunt, however drained his reservoirs of resilience. As long as danger threatened, he would dredge up reserves from somewhere to keep going, and Sam needed his big brother on his feet now. It had to be at least a quarter of a mile back to the Impala, and Sam doubted he could drag his own sore legs; he certainly couldn't carry anyone. But despite the sound strategic sense behind it, he couldn't bring himself to lie and increase the burden on Dean's shoulders.

"Yeah, we got him. The last Confederate soldier finally bites the dust."

"Well...good." Dean's eyes slid shut again.

"Hey, man up!" Sam tried to keep the atmosphere light. "I'm not carrying your lazy ass back to the Impala."

There was an incoherent mumble that might have indicated agreement.

"I mean it. There's no way, with your injuries, that I could transport you fireman style. I'd have to carry you like a blushing bride. Think of your image."

The next murmer was more coherent and definitely more pornographic in nature, with a clear suggestion of what he could do with his wedding rituals.

Sam hauled the older man up to his feet, bracing him when his knees buckled.

"OK, get your mitts off, I'm fine," Dean muttered unconvincingly, but he made no further protest as Sam got his shoulder under his brother's and propelled them both forward. "Oh yeah, this'll work," he complained. "Tectonic plates move faster than us."

Their halting progress seemed unavailing, an unending nightmare of pain and confusion. The contrast to Sam's earlier headlong rush couldn't have been more marked, and he found that he remembered none of the physical features he'd passed earlier in a blur of urgency, blindly following the gold thread of his brother's life force. Without that to guide him now, he could only hope he was heading in the right direction.

The moonlight glimmered off the sickly sheen of sweat that covered Dean's face, chalky lines between lurid patches of blood. He was silent save for the continuous hoarse gasps for breath and the occasional bitten-off grunt at an unexpected jolt from the uneven ground.

Sam kept up a littany of encouragment, but he was unsure if Dean was capable of processing any input. He kept monitoring that internal sense of his brother, but it was like prodding a raw nerve in a cracked tooth. As exhaustion dragged him down with heavy hands, the glow of Dean's consciousness had dwindled down to a distant spark that corresponded to the slowing of his physical movement, so Sam had some warning when that embattled spark blinked out with a horrifying finality and his brother became dead weight in his arms.

In counterpoint to the numbing silence in his head, Dean's pulse beat out an assurance of life against his fingertips, but it was a feeble, frantic, ineffectual thumping that reminded Sam of the fluttering wings of a sparrow he'd seen trapped beneath a glass ceiling, the bird weakened after repeated, futile efforts to reach the freedom it could see but not attain.

He looked around automatically for help, but the realisation soon hit that they had seen not a single live soul since arriving at the plantation, at least nothing larger than a crow. It was all down to him, the responsibility that Dean so willingly shouldered was now transferred, and he'd be damned before he failed his brother. He took a moment to gather his energy, feeling Dean's shaky breath against his neck, his own breathing almost equally jagged and shallow. Then, careful of his brother's injuries, he heaved him to his feet, locking his arms around the other man's chest. In that position, he half-carried, half-dragged him until, finally, he saw the glint of light off the black sheen of the Impala.


	9. Chapter 9

Author's note: So we come to the end of this journey. Sam and Dean will be continuing theirs in Season 7 in a week or so! Thank you firstly to Susan for doing such a fantastic beta job under adverse conditions. What would I do without you! Thank you also to those of you who have reviewed. Hearing that people were enjoying the story made me very happy!

Chapter 9

The next three days were the most miserable and anxiety-ridden that Sam could remember. He had carried his brother into their motel room under cover of darkness. If Dean had been conscious, Sam would have been able to tease him mercilessly about thresholds and wedding nights as he lowered him gently onto the bed, but the older man's utter stillness robbed the situation of any humour.

Sam spent every minute of the next 72 hours second-guessing his decision not to take Dean to the hospital, his fingers hovering restlessly over the 911 button on his speed dial. If his brother's injuries hadn't included a bullet wound, he wouldn't have hesitated to call for help, but, as it was, the police would have instantly been involved, and Dean's shiny new status as one of the nation's most wanted made it just too great a risk. Hick country sheriffs were one thing, but Henricksen and the FBI had shown a disconcerting tendency to descend with frightening speed at the merest whisper of their presence, and Sam doubted his ability to effect an escape from a top-security facility. Since death from lethal injection further down the road would be just as permanent as death from blood loss now, he'd risk summoning professional help only if he were sure there was no choice. That left Sam riding the knife edge of that decision for agonising hours, his brother's life in his hands either way.

At first, he had been busy cleaning his brother up and assessing his injuries, searching for anything serious that he'd missed. Mottled bruising of lurid hot reds and purples seemed to cover Dean's entire torso, interspersed occasionally with sharp red slices and, off on one side, yet eye-catching in its swollen grotesqueness, was the bullet hole. Dean's whole body was a road map, signposting each painful encounter with the entity. Sam carefully shunted aside the knowledge that most of the damage had been inflicted by his hands. There was no time for indulging in guilt or in the memory of his helpless terror, his body not under his control, fighting for just a modicum of ascendancy over the hitchhiker to prevent his brother's death.

Next, he had to focus on disinfecting, debriding, stitching, and perhaps most importantly, getting liquids and antibiotics into the unconscious man. Sam was reassured by the lack of any life-threatening damage, and although he knew the cumulative effect of smaller wounds and hypovolemic shock could kill, it was impossible to believe that Dean Winchester would die of blood loss. His big brother was way too tough for anything less than a catastrophic injury to take him out. However, that confidence was to be tested, shaken, and ultimately severely pummeled almost into submission as Dean lay utterly unresponsive for long days and even longer nights. Sam watched him breathe, a hand resting on his brother's arm, ostensibly to test for fever. He fought, sometimes unavailingly, against sleep, afraid of the nightmares that lay in ambush, but more afraid that, if he shut he eyes for even a nap, Dean would slip away, unanchored by his presence.

Dean's freckles stood out against the stark pallor of his skin, eyes sunk deep in shadowed hollows. His continuing dehydration showed in his dry, cracked lips and the skin stretched too tightly, almost translucent, over sharp bone structure even with his features unnaturally slack. The unrelenting silence quickly became oppressive, but it didn't occur to Sam to turn on the TV, and he remained oblivious to the muted voices next door and the random banging of doors as he concentrated on the softest susurration of breath and the slightest expansion of his brother's rib cage. It was only on the third day, when Dean's marble complexion became tempered by a more natural tinge of colour, and his unnatural stillness relaxed into a more normal attitude of sleep, that Sam abruptly transitioned from listening to talking.

Like a dam giving way under intense pressure and spewing forth the jagged debris of faulty construction before being washed clean by the cathartic force of water, he choked out a miserable mixture of apology and narration. Sam needed to talk to his brother, to unburden himself of the filthy embrace of the confederate spirit, the entity's foul memories and evil intent. Dean unconscious sometimes made an easier audience than a Dean awake and conversing.

"I tried to fight him," Sam concluded in a whisper, "but it was like...like...I don't know, like climbing a sheer cliff which had no handholds and I had no hands anyway. Or like trying to explain the colour blue to someone blind since birth." How in the hell could one put words to something that was so alien to the human psyche? "It was like being in a sensory deprivation chamber, yet being arbitrarily force-fed sensory input that wasn't mine." He laughed deprecatingly. "I could come up with a dozen metaphors, but none of them would come anywhere near what it was like."

He was seized by a sudden aching desire to talk to his father, to benefit from John Winchester's experience to reconcile his own memories. Suddenly needing some kind of response from his brother, Sam shook his arm lightly, "Damn it, Dean, wake up! You're freaking me out. Just open your eyes and tell me not to be a whiny girl."

There might have been a twitch in Dean's left pinky, but otherwise he seemed to sleep on undisturbed. "You'd wake up if Dad were here to order you," Sam grumbled. "I guess this is something else he and I would have had in common. We could bond over being possessed and trying to kill you." It wasn't even remotely funny, and Sam's voice broke on the last word. He pressed the heels of his hands into his eyes, breathing deeply to regain his composure. But apparently the shakiness in his voice succeeded where a direct command did not.

"Sam?" That breath of sound wasn't truly a question or even an acknowledgment, merely the first thought to cross Dean's mind as he surfed the borders of consciousness, but Sam had never been so happy to hear his name. A bubble of totally unexpected, and maybe inappropriate, laughter rose up and caught in his throat, tickling until he let it escape. Dean was ever and always Dean, and Sam's fear that his brother would see Marston superimposed on his features was apparently without foundation.

One long sweep of eyelashes inched back, and a squint of irritable green surveyed him. Apparently he passed muster, because they started to slide shut again, and Sam quickly interspersed an objection. "You can sleep all you want in a minute, just drink something first." He supported Dean's head and attempted to get as much of the rather stale glass of water down his brother's throat as he could without drowning him, then the older man curled up on his less injured side. Sam crawled on the covers next to him, eschewing his own queen-size bed, partly out of the hope that his proximity would alert him if Dean needed help, but mainly because he lacked the energy to move further.

For the next couple of days, Dean was, for the first time ever, a model patient, neither complaining nor pushing himself prematurely. Sam had expected that the lack of life-threatening physical injuries would cause his brother to downplay the severity of his condition. He suspected that this unnatural cooperation could be attributed to the seepage of his own guilt and worry through the still-active link between them. Dean clearly didn't want to intensify these negative emotions and limited his frustration to the development of chronic eyeroll syndrome, elevating it to Olympic heights. He slept for long periods and seemed subdued in the short spaces between. Sam didn't push for an explanation, content with monitoring his brother's condition remotely, by means of the bond. It made doling out the painkillers especially a timely affair. Dean would direct his gaze heavenward, but throw back the pills without protest.

The link was a source of constant fascination for Sam, providing him with hours of research, experimentation and entertainment. It was also preferable to his alternate choices of talk shows, game shows and watching Dean snore. His most fertile periods of analysis came when Dean was asleep, which restricted his brother's worth as a guinea pig, but had the advantage of allowing Sam to continue unscathed.

He had discovered that distance affected the intensity of the bond, though he hadn't been far enough away to see if it would fade entirely. He was slightly ashamed to admit that he could awake Dean from a deep sleep by projecting fear and panic. However, he hadn't learnt anything new about his brother. The link had enabled him to confirm things he'd strongly suspected, that Dean didn't hate being fussed over quite as much as he always professed, in fact, it wasn't a surprise to find that much of what the older man said camouflaged what he really felt. It took little to make him content - give him food and his brother's company and he was content, even if a stream of sarcastic comments dripped continuously from his lips.

What he had yet to determine was how much Dean knew that he didn't. It seemed that Dean had more control over the link than he did. Maybe as the instigator of the bond, he had the equivalent of a faucet at his command, controlling the flow of information, because sometimes Sam could feel a trickle of emotion from Dean that was abruptly cut off. But Dean had remained silent on the topic and, as the itch of Sam's curiosity remained unsatisfied, the younger man was becoming more irritated.

Finally, he grew tired of waiting for his brother to broach the topic. On the third day after Dean's return to consciousness, he insisted on celebrating his ability to sit up at the table instead of remaining in bed with real food. Sam had reluctantly complied and returned with an artery-clogging, cholesterol-laden breakfast of bacon, sausage, eggs, biscuits, and hash browns all slathered in gravy that was a truly disgusting, undetermined gray. Sam's own more modest breakfast of an omelet lay untouched on his plate, but his mouth was watering as he experienced Dean's unfettered enjoyment in his food.

"So, is this thing permanent?" he asked abruptly, gesturing back and forth between them, his hands flailing and inexact.

Dean smirked, and Sam recoiled from the glimpse of half-masticated sausage and gravy it afforded him. It also gave a warning of Dean's deflection of the inquiry. In a voice usually reserved for demanding and tantrum prone six-year-olds, Dean explained sweetly, "Of course, Sammy, we'll always be brothers."

He seemed to have forgotten that Sam could now read the affection and sincerity that ringed the words. Sam returned the saccharine smile with a scowl, for form's sake, and decided on a change of tactics. "You know, Dean, I can practically taste every mouthful you're eating there. So what happens the next time you pick up some skanky waitress for the horizontal tango? Do I get my own free porn channel?"

Dean didn't look the slightest bit disturbed by the notion of anyone witnessing him in his priapismic glory, and Sam realised his error. "Okay," he amended quickly. "What if I pick someone up and bring her back to the room? How would you enjoy the show?"

"Dude, ewww!" Dean looked horrified. "Thanks for the visual. Now I have to spork my eyes out."

Sam shoved the victory smugly down the link. "So unless both of us are prepared to take a vow of chastity - and you know which of us will find that easier - then we need to do something about this thing." He repeated his earlier gesture, but this time with more assurance.

Dean looked as if he were contemplating drowning himself in his gravy in preference to having the conversation. Sam could now read nothing but the simple fact of his brother's presence through the link.

"Most of the effects should fade within a few weeks or a month," Dean eventually stated.

Sam raised an eyebrow. "'Most' meaning what exactly?"

"I'm not exactly sure. It's not like I've done this before."

"What the hell were you thinking? It was blood magic. That's not something you mess with half-assed." Sam pushed back from the table, abandoning his omelet. Motel rooms didn't lend themselves to pacing, and Sam's long legs made it a total exercise in futility, so he relieved his frustration by kicking the ugly floral wallpaper before turning back.

As expected, Dean's temper rose up to meet his, although it was still restrained, his tone as dry as dust and just as gritty. "Do you have any better suggestions, even now with your perfect 20/20 hindsight? Marston wasn't a demon. There were no convenient exorcism possibilities. So tell me, college boy, what would you have done?"

Dean had twisted in his chair to keep his brother in sight, and the flavour of his pain seeped through to Sam, temporarily derailing his anger. He stalked over to their medical supplies, pulling out pain medication and slamming it down on the table.

"Take your damn pills," he ordered curtly. Dean eyed him defiantly, ignoring the white tablets until Sam geared himself up for battle, at which point his brother tossed them into his mouth, chasing them down with a mouthful of water.

"I wouldn't have messed around with something I didn't fully understand." Sam resumed the argument without missing a beat.

"I understand just fine, Einstein. I understand that it worked, I understand that we're both alive, and that beats the goddam alternative."

"If it's so wonderful, why haven't you used it before? Why isn't it written in Dad's journal?"

"It's not exactly a recipe for frigging tomato soup, Sam. It's not like it has a lot of applications, and the people I can use it on are limited to you, you and, oh, let me think, you."

Sam didn't even know why he was still pushing the issue. An amorphous anger, mostly directed at himself, swelled and surged inside, and he needed to lash out, the words spewing out like hot lava, a pyroclastic flow designed to destroy everything in its path, Dean merely an inadvertent casualty.

He wrinkled his nose in a snarl, ignoring Dean's sarcasm with the ease of long practice. "And what if it hadn't worked? You nearly bled yourself dry as it was. What if you'd lost control? Failed blood magic will always rebound on its caster. It would have killed you!"

"It didn't," Dean replied shortly. He pushed the plate away, his appetite lost under the onslaught of his brother's sudden hostility.

"It could have done," Sam insisted stubbornly.

"What the hell's your problem? I didn't have a choice!"

"Yes, you did have a choice, Dean. You made me a promise!"

This final attack decimated the last of Dean's defences and suddenly, as something twisted inside him, Sam could feel the pain curdling around every word he'd used to break his brother open. He'd got what he'd been angling for, and now wished he hadn't.

Dean had somehow risen to his feet without Sam noticing the movement; he was just suddenly staring into those familiar green eyes, frozen in position as the depth of love and fierce loyalty radiated from Dean's spirit to his own, and his suggestion unearthed the darkest, most primal depth of innate protectiveness. The desperate fear coated with stubbornness he saw reflected there echoed in the link. Both stated silently, but as clearly as if shouted from the rooftops, that Dean would die for him without hesitation, might die with him, would probably die without him, but there was no way on God's green earth that he would kill him.

Sam's heart felt that it might explode from the weight of everything Dean was feeling. He turned away blindly, taking the few steps necessary to collapse on the bed, burying his face in his hands. He could feel the progression of Dean's emotions - anger and fear ceding without a struggle to confusion and, inevitably, to concern. He didn't have to see or hear to sense his brother's shaky progress across the floor until the bed dipped beside him. There was a brief moment of resigned, exasperated affection, then realisation and the channel clamped shut.

It was as if a tremendous pressure he'd been bracing himself against was removed, and he slumped forward at its loss. Dean grabbed him by the scruff of his shirt and pulled him back, steadying him and leaving a hand casually on his shoulder.

"I'm sorry, I'm sorry." The litany of apologies was easier to start than to stop, and Sam wasn't even sure if he was apologising for his actions while possessed by Marston, for provoking the fight, or for asking Dean to kill him.

Dean shoulder checked him gently. "Drama queen."

The warmth of that teasing permeated his mind with a sense of, not forgiveness, but the belief that there was no need for forgiveness. Sam marveled at the ease of that, but for Dean it was just that easy.

A sharper elbow caught his side, and he looked up to see Dean mournfully gazing at his congealed food. "I was enjoying that," he said, aggrieved, apparently willing to bear a grudge for the loss of his food.

'Idiot,' Sam thought as hard as he could down the link while aloud he pointed out, "I'm sure that gray slop tastes just as good the second time around. I'll heat it in the microwave." He wasn't quite so sure the fluffy goodness of his omelet would withstand the radiation. He scraped up the most tasty remnants gingerly, while Dean's enjoyment seemed unabated. He shoveled it into his mouth as if the greasy slop would make a run for it if he paused for more than a second between mouthfuls.

"Dean," he began tentatively, and, at the resulting look of wariness, he raised his hand appeasingly. "I swear I'm not looking for a fight. You did what you had to, I get it. You have amazing instincts, and you trusted them, and you were right to do so. But what if Marston had been right and depossessing him killed me?" He could feel Dean flinch, even though his brother seemed carved of marble. "He really thought it would, you know, it wasn't a bluff."

Dean shook his head in denial, his face washed a shade paler, his realisation churning Sam's stomach. "What the hell were you thinking? Why didn't you tell me?" he forced out. "You told me to keep going."

Unlike earlier, Sam quickly moved to defuse this anger, while offering another oblique apology of his own. "Because contrary to the crap I was spouting earlier, I really do trust you. Besides, anything was preferable to what he had in store for me. Anyway, that wasn't my point," he continued hastily as Dean appeared less than mollified. "If it had killed me, with you doing blood magic, would it have killed you too?"

Dean didn't bother with an answer, just stared at him inscrutably.

"Yeah, that's what I thought." Sam looked away for a moment, struggling with acceptance of that concept. He soon looked back, the next question too important to leave unanswered. "And now?"

Dean gave a half-grin. "If I say yes, will you stop asking me to shoot you?"

"Dean!" Sam hated the fact that it sounded like the whine of a six-year-old, but it was easy to fall back on what worked.

"I don't know." Dean allowed Sam to feel the honesty of that answer, and his utter unconcern with that possibility also seeped through.

"That's..." Sam struggled to find the words, but he was sure Dean could read his distress. "That's not what I want." It was the understatement of the century.

Dean's push of sympathy was at odds with his slightly smug response. "Well, you'll just have to take good care of yourself in the next few months, just in case."

"What about the other way round. What happens if you...you know."

Dean hesitated. "At the time, yeah, there was a good chance, but now, no." He couldn't explain why he was so sure about that. He just knew that there was no way he was taking his brother down with him. He would find a way to break the link before that happened.

Sam muttered something unintelligible, but Dean didn't need to understand it to read the dissatisfaction with his answer.

"You know, there is a bright side to all of this," he pointed out cheerfully.

Sam looked across at him suspiciously, "Oh, yeah?"

"It's cheaper than the lo-jack I've been promising to get you." Dean was quite happy to sacrifice a little privacy for the security of knowing that the next time some cannibalistic, inbred psychopaths kidnapped his brother, he'd be able to immediately zero in on his location. That indelible sense of his brother in his mind was a comforting sensation, and he was in no hurry to lose it. The second best thing about the link, in Dean's opinion, was that they shouldn't have to talk about crap like this again. He was hoping that Sam would read his mind on this and let it go. Apparently, the message got through.

"I should change your dressing." Of course, Sam's choice of alternative activities left a lot to be desired. Dean wanted to protest, but wound care was serious business in the Winchester household, and the last thing he wanted to do was to compound Sam's guilt by allowing any of his injuries to fester, so, with an aggrieved sigh, he submitted to his brother's ministrations.

Sam was far from satisfied with their conversation, but he would gain nothing by pushing Dean further. He allowed himself to relax and to enjoy the relative peace that enveloped them. There had always been a deep connection between them, so this link wasn't really anything new, and it was an excellent opportunity to learn more about what made his brother tick. He knew exactly where he wanted to start.

"So, Dean, tell me more about New Orleans." 


End file.
